It's a pretty fundamental prediction though, and it's been derived in many different ways, all of which give the same prediction.
It's closely related to the Unruh effect, which is a direct consequence of pure QFT. The Unruh effect describes how an accelerated observer sees a different vacuum from an inertial observer - they see radiation that the inertial observer doesn't.
Hawking radiation is essentially this same effect, except that "acceleration" is replaced by "gravity" (Einstein's equivalence principle.) There's a bit more to it, but that's the basic intuition.
For Hawking radiation to be wrong would require some fundamental changes to GR, QFT, or both.
A lot of great science progress followed after some "fundamental prediction" turned out to be wrong :). Wouldnt it be awesome to learn that blackholes, in fact, do not evaporate at all? That would be exciting
That's the point, evaporation turns matter into energy. You can tune power by chosing mass of the black hole and then feed it regular matter at a steady rate.
Minor nit-pick but Hawking Radiation hasn't been observed and remains a theoretical prediction.
It's pretty widely accepted though. He himself hated the idea so you can expect he did the calculations thoroughly.
I love that major scientists had a intense hatred for the concepts forced upon them by the universe. Einstein and quantum mechanics come to mind
It's a pretty fundamental prediction though, and it's been derived in many different ways, all of which give the same prediction.
It's closely related to the Unruh effect, which is a direct consequence of pure QFT. The Unruh effect describes how an accelerated observer sees a different vacuum from an inertial observer - they see radiation that the inertial observer doesn't.
Hawking radiation is essentially this same effect, except that "acceleration" is replaced by "gravity" (Einstein's equivalence principle.) There's a bit more to it, but that's the basic intuition.
For Hawking radiation to be wrong would require some fundamental changes to GR, QFT, or both.
A lot of great science progress followed after some "fundamental prediction" turned out to be wrong :). Wouldnt it be awesome to learn that blackholes, in fact, do not evaporate at all? That would be exciting
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That's the point, evaporation turns matter into energy. You can tune power by chosing mass of the black hole and then feed it regular matter at a steady rate.
Not before efficiently converting a large amount of mass into usable energy.
In the same way that atomic weapons and radioisotope generators both convert mass into energy. It's just a matter of slightly different timescales.
But you want that to happen in space and to control the output of energy.
Otherwise you just have a bomb.
The difference between a bomb and a reactor is just clever engineering.
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Dual use technology, you say?
How could we harness this energy and make it usable?
You use it to boil water.
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If I knew that, I'd probably have more important things to do than comment it here.
You could pen a carefully-worded a letter of demands and send it to some Billionaire? A bit on the risky side, but - hey, you only live once etc.