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
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