quantum gravity effects make a black hole act like a hot object—the smaller, the hotter—that gives off heat radiation now known as Hawking radiation. This means that the black hole gradually loses energy and evaporates away. In other words, whatever matter you dump into the black hole will eventually come back out again as heat radiation, so by the time the black hole has completely evaporated, you’ve converted your matter to radiation with nearly 100% efficiency.*3 A problem with using black hole evaporation as a power source is that, unless the black hole is much smaller than an atom in
...more
