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You have some misconceptions. 1) For all that we have been able to measure it, the electron is a point particle. It does not have a radius. The concept of ra
by at_a_remove 4y ago
You have some misconceptions.
1) For all that we have been able to measure it, the electron is a point particle. It does not have a radius. The concept of radius does not apply. Every time we try to measure it, we just end up setting a smaller upper bound for the radius than last time. This is true of all of the leptons ("lightweight particles"). The same sorts of probes of electrons suggest that there is no "stuff" in them. That's all you get, this point with some numbers associated with it (charge, mass, angular momentum, lepton number, etc).
2) Black holes -- and I am going to constrain myself to a "no-hair" situation for those of you in the know -- have only three variables that describe them: mass, charge, and angular momentum. Anything else describes its position and how it is moving at the time. They're really quite dull. (Exploration of where the information that fell into the black hole went is ... contentious, abandoned, frustrating, etc). Radius is a function of mass (and angular momentum, you can distort the event horizon if it had enough spin).
3) They don't "explode." The theorized-but-not-yet-observed Hawking radiation is about chucking out the occasional particle and "borrowing" it from the black hole. This is done under conservation of the above mass, charge, and angular momentum. The smaller they get, the more chance they throw something out, so it is really a runaway process that only looks like an explosion at the end.
4) Due to this conservation, if you somehow made a single electron into a black hole, that black hole could only ever spit out one thing in its lifetime: an electron.
5) The proton is quite different. It is not the opposite of an electron. It is known as what is called a baryon ("heavyweight particle") and it has a size. It is also composed of smaller things, unlike the electron, three quarks and some gluons (which serve to hold the whole thing together).
6) Atomic scales are fine. We can understand things about relativity at the atomic scale. For example, we use the surprisingly extended half-lives of certain incoming particles to verify time dilation. Or just look up how relativity affects the orbital radii of very heavy atoms, in particular gold. Subatomic scales are more interesting.
- gradschool 4y agoThank you for your comments. I might have at least one other misconception in need of clearing up. My impression from reading about it somewhere was that the Hawking radiation is predicted to happen as a consequence of vacuum fluctuations. When an electron-positron pair spontaneously forms close to the event horizon, and one particle falls in but the other doesn't, they can't annihilate so the one that's left outside appears to emanate from the black hole. Is that not the consensus, or if it is, why should the amount of radiation depend on anything but the surface area of the event horizon?
- platz 4y agoYour description of hawking radiation isn't quite accurate. It's a popular misconception. the actual process is not as easy to understand. see below: https://youtu.be/qPKj0YnKANw https://youtu.be/qPKj0YnKANw That said, what the OP said about "borrowing" electrons I am not sure about.
- at_a_remove 4y agoIt's more of an accounting deal. There's mass where there didn't used to be, and it was pretty near here so ... we gotta make the books balance.
- at_a_remove 4y agoYou are pretty close. It's the curvature of the surface area. Smaller black holes have a less ... homogenous orbital space near the event horizon. More tidal forces, etc, so a particle-antiparticle production would be more likely to be torn apart.