General Relativity and Gravitation (2025) 57:78

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-025-03391-4

PERSPECTIVE

Black hole evaporation – 50 years

William G. Unruh1,2

Received: 19 November 2024 / Accepted: 27 February 2025

© The Author(s) 2025

Abstract
Personal reflections (this is not a scholarly history but my own memories and work
on this topic). I apologize beforehand to everyone whose work I do not mention. Note
that there is lots of such work, much brilliant. [This document is a transcription of the
slides used at the conference, and as a result is rather rough as a document.]

Keywords Black-holes · History · Toy models

Contents

Early days . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hawking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What is a particle? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Inside affects outside? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Boundary condition on singularity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Where are particles created? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A model of black hole emission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Planck-scale problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Experimental black hole temperature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
String theory? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Early days

1967 – I began my work on my PhD at Princeton. After my Generals I asked John

Wheeler if I could work with him. This was a heyday for his group, about nine graduate

I, William Unruh, reserve the right to use up to 50% of the material (whether text, figures, equations, or
any other forms of expression contained herein) in this paper in other works which bear my name as one
of the authors without obtaining permission from Springer Nature to do so. Those other works may be any
form of expression, whether now known or unknown, and whether human or otherwise.

B William G. Unruh
[email protected]

1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T

1Z1, Canada
2 IQSE. Texas A&M, College Station, Tx 77843-4242, USA

0123456789().: V,-vol 123

 78 Page 2 of 12 W. G. Unruh

students [Robert Wald, Bei-Lok Hu, Claudio Teitelboim (now Bunster), Jacob Beken-
stein, Steve Fulling (Wightman’s student), Demetrios Christodoulou (Ruffini), Nial
O’Murachadha (York), Cliff Rhoades, Brendan Godfry], one postdoc (Remo Ruffini),
two assistant professors (Karel Kuchar, Jimmy York) and a sabbatical visitor (Charlie
Misner).
The key topic of almost all of their research was quantum mechanics and gravity.
Key people whose research really influenced me:
Steve Fulling – gave informal lectures on quantum field theory (he had translated
Bogoliubov’s text from Russian to English in 1968), worked on quantum field theory
in curved spacetime (strongly influenced by Leonard Parker’s work on quantum fields
in cosmological spacetimes [1]) and worked on quantization of quantum fields in
Minkowski spacetime and in “Rindler” spacetime (he named the latter) [2].
Demetrios Christodoulou – showed that there was for Schwarzschild and Kerr, a
quantity called the “irreducible mass”, which had to increase if positive energy flowed
through the horizon [3, 4]. At the same time, and independently, Hawking showed
that the surface area of a sequence of cross-sections of the horizon of a black hole had
to increase if the energy-momentum flux through the horizon was positive [5]. Both
acted like entropy (i.e. increased with time).
Meanwhile Wheeler had given Bekenstein the problem of what happened to the
second law of thermodynamics if entropy disappeared down the black hole.
Bekenstein chose Hawking’s more general formulation as a better analogy of
entropy. This led him, and then Jim Bardeen, Brandon Carter, and Hawking to for-
mulate the “Thermodynamics of black holes” [6]. It was silly because there was no
temperature. Black holes absorb. They do not emit anything. Bob Geroch threw another
spanner in the works. Bekenstein had postulated a heat engine with black holes. Fill
a box with high entropy radiation, lower it slowly on a rope toward the black hole
horizon extracting its energy through the tension on the rope. However, by lowering
to the horizon one could extract all of its energy, thus violating the 2nd law [7].
Disaster! Bekenstein’s solution [8] was: You cannot lower the box all the way to
the horizon. There is another new law of physics which says that the entropy to energy
ratio of the contents of the box is limited by the radial dimension of the box (he cited
many many examples of quantum fields in boxes for which this is true). Hawking
decided to get involved in the game of the behaviour of quantum fields (scalar fields)
in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild black hole formed by collapse [9, 10]. I recall in
early 1973 visiting a conference at Cambridge in the UK (my girlfriend, had been left
behind when I moved from Birkbeck college where I was Roger Penrose’s postdoc,
to a Miller Fellowship at Berkeley, so I found every excuse I could to go to the UK)
and overhearing Don Page talking to Hawking about some calculation about quantum
fields near black holes that Hawking was doing.
In the meantime I was getting interested in Fulling’s thesis, in which he asked, but
did not answer, the question as to whether or not field quantization was the same in
Minkowski and Rindler spacetimes. I showed (to myself) that they were different,
by using the horizon in Rindler spacetime as an initial value surface for the quantum
fields, that one quantization corresponded using the affine parameter along the horizon
to define “positive frequency” for field quantization, which gave the usual Minkowski
quantization. while using the acceleration Killing parameter gave Rindler quantization.

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I also showed the relation between them. I did not notice that the relationship was
thermal.
I wrote Fulling a letter outlining this result, but did not publish it till 1976 [11], much
to Fulling’s disgust (and my future chagrin). In early 1974, I went to the conference at
the Rutherford labs where Hawking first presented his results (he had sent out preprints
in late 1973, and I got one just before Christmas via Abe Taub and Vince Moncrief,
Taub’s postdoc). Just before the conference, I had showed my paper on quantization
in the Kerr metric to Sciama, and he told me I could have 10 min in the conference
to present it. Instead I tried to present the Minkowski-Rindler results, but made a
complete hash of the presentation.

Hawking

In early 1974, Hawking’s result, that the quantization of a scalar field around a star
which collapses to a black hole would produce a flux of radiation with temperature,
was published [9, 10]
1 c3
T = . (1)
8π M Gk B

Well not quite – because the black hole has an albedo to absorption and emission
due to the angular momentum of the field and the curvature of the spacetime which
filters out the low frequencies of the thermal spectrum, Hawking’s result is valid for
the (red-shift corrected) temperature of the black hole horizon, not of the emission
temperature at infinity.
In 1976, I published my paper “Notes on black hole evaporation” [11] in which I
tried to clarify what was happening in the emission process by the black hole, also
using the same affine and Killing parameterizations I had used in showing that flat
space-time had two quantizations. I argued that the affine quantization (which was the
Minkowski quantization in flat spacetime) is roughly the state one would expect after
the collapse of a start to a black hole. An accelerated observer (i.e. someone held at
constant radius near a black hole, or at constant acceleration in flat spacetime) would
see itself surrounded by a fluid of particles with a temperature proportional to the
acceleration
a 
T = . (2)
2π ck B

Near the black hole, the Hawking radiation looks just like this acceleration radiation.
Further away (greater than about 1.5 times the radius of the black hole) the Hawking
radiation looks like the radiation from a finite sized hot body with a low frequency non-
zero albedo. This led to my favourite paper [12] (written with Wald), because of one
of the references. I had always found Bekenstein’s entropy-to-energy ratio argument
problematic. However, the acceleration radiation gave an alternative argument for why
black holes do not violate the second law. Near the black hole, as one lowers the box,
it is surrounded by a thermal fluid, which exerts a buoyant force on the box, according
to a pre-print written by a Greek by named Archimedes over 2200 years ago. Than

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buoyant force reduces the energy extracted in lowering and saves the second law,
without the need for new physics.
One of the questions which bothered me from the beginning [13]: “Where are the
particles in black hole evaporation created?”

What is a particle?

A quantum field theory is firstly a field. It exists everywhere at all times. A particle
is something with a well defined location at any time, carrying a well defined energy
and momentum. Traditional approach is to quantize the amplitude of the modes of
the field (like the plane wave modes) as harmonic oscillators and call the resultant
harmonic discrete energy levels – Particles

ak
φ(t, x) = d 3k  e−iωt eik·x + H.C. (3)
(2π ) 2ω
3

But this is silly – This is totally delocalised definition and does not represent a localised
particle.
My attitude was: “A particle is what a particle detector detects.”
This is a localised definition since detectors (Geiger detector, cloud chamber, bubble
bubble chamber, spark chamber,...) are localised. In particular one can look near a black
hole to see what is happening there and perhaps see the particles being created.
Wald and I [14] wrote – “What happens when an accelerated particle detector
detects a particle?” One answer would be that in the Minkowski vacuum, the detector
never does click − the vacuum has no particles. False: whether or not it has particles
depends on the state of motion of the detector. In 1 + 1 dimensions, for example

1
ψ Mω,k = √ e−iωt ; ω > 0, (4)
(2π )2ω
1
ψ Rν,k = √
(2π )2ν sinh νM
 
ν M/2
e (z)e−iν(τ̂ −ρ+ ) + e−ν M/2 (τ̂ + ρ)eiν(τ̂ −ρ− ) ; ∀ν. (5)

Identical set of positive norm modes:

ei t ; Minkowski detector creation operator mode,

ei N τ ; Rindler detector creation operator.

where τ is the proper time for the accelerated detector. If an accelerated detector
detects a particle the probability of the emitted particle being in the acausal region of
the detection is much higher than in the region containing the detector.
This has led people to say that this represents a tunnelling process (like the
Schwinger EM particle creation). The evidence is against this.

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Fig. 1 Two impenetrable boxes with different vacua

Inside affects outside?

False: Consider two impenetrable boxes, length L, inside coordinates x± with fields
inside the boxes (see Fig. 1). Assume that the walls are completely impermeable to
the fields. One can have the usual plane wave modes to define two separate vacuum
state, one in each box. A static detector will see nothing.
However one can put the field into another Gaussian pure state in which, using a
Bogoliubov two mode set of squeezed states for each frequency in the two boxes, one
gets a very different result [15]

e−iωn t sin nπ x± /L
φ = an √ + H.C. (6)
2π L2ωin
an± |0 M  = ; ωn > 0. (7)

This is a squeezed state Rindler analog. Now a detector at rest placed into either box
will be thermally excited, exactly like how an accelerated detector at rest in Rindler
coordinates would be:

† e−ωn /4T
bn+ = cosh θn an+ + sinh θn an− ; sinh θn = √ (8)
sinh ωn /2T
bn± |0 R  = 0. (9)

If the detector is placed into the usual vacuum, it will not be excited. If the detector
is placed into squeezed vacuum, it can be excited while emitting a particle which
is dominantly in the opposite box. For example, if the detector is in the + box and
the detector frequency is much larger than the temperature T , then the probability
is exponentially larger that the particle is in the “- box” than in the “+box”. This
is precisely the situation (except for boundaries) for an accelerated detector in the
Minkowski vacuum.
This also applies to a black hole spacetime, where the state after collapse is close
(except at exponentially low final frequencies) to the Minkowski vacuum. If your
detector clicks and thus detects a particle, the probability is much higher that the
particle is inside the horizon if the detector is near the horizon (see Fig. 2)

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Fig. 2 Representation of a Minkowski mode on the Rindler wedge

Boundary condition on singularity?

To solve what is called the information paradox one needs to solve a problem: The
information that went into the black hole must flow out of the black hole eventually
(somehow). But it also flows into the singularity. This clones the inflowing information
into to both outside the black hole and into the singularity. However one cannot clone
a quantum state. Proposed solution: place boundary condition on the singularity.
However quantum mechanics is not classical mechanics. Future boundary condi-
tions are not equivalent to past conditions. The predictions of quantum theory become
very strange.
The simplest example is the following. Consider a two level system (e.g. a spin
1/2 particle). At 9AM, the spin is measured in the x direction and found to be +1/2.
At 11 it is measured in the y direction and found to be +1/2. At 10 a student snuck
into the lab and measured it in a direction between x and y. What is the probability
that she measured +1/2? Quantum mechanics answers this simply. It is a probability
distribution such that if she measured it in the x direction, the probability must be
unity. If she measured it in the y direction, the probability is also 1. Other angles
give probabilities given by Fig. 3. Note that there is no state, or density matrix which
gives this resultant distribution, and yet it is almost trivially calculated by quantum
mechanics.
Yakir Aharonov and his collaborators have looked at the strange results that standard
quantum mechanics gives for such initial and final state. As an example, let us take

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Fig. 3 Probability distribution of finding the spin in direction θ to be 1/2 given initial and final knowledge
of spin value in x and y directions

a spin 12.5 particle and set the condition that the initial x and final√y components
are 12.5. At the intermediate time, measure the spin in the (x + y)/ 2 direction. If
one uses a measuring device which is inaccurate – for example, create a measuring
apparatus whose pointer has a Hamiltonian of H = P Sθ δ(t) where θ is the angle
from the x axis. This detector has an intial state with a Gaussian initial distribution of
width σ . After the measurement of the position of the “pointer”, given some initial
state of the spin, the pointer will have a probability distribution of a bunch of Gaussian
functions of width σ centered at 12.5, 11.5, 10.5, . . . − 12.5 If one places the two
time conditions on the measurements, (Sx = 12.5 before the measurement of S45 and
S y = 12.5 afterwards,) and the Gaussian of the measuring apparatus for S45 has a
width much less than 1, the probability distribution is a bunch of narrow Gaussians
each centered at one of the half integer values between −12.5 and 12.5, as seen in
Fig. 4a. As σ becomes large, however, the peaks in the probability distribution become
fewer, and move to higher values. At σ = 1.5 (Fig. 4b) - (i.e., such that the initial
uncertainty of the pointer is 50% larger than the distance between the peaks in Fig. 4a
– the peaks in the probability distribution become broad and center on values which
have little relation to the eigenvalues of spin. By the time σ becomes 3 (Fig. 4c), there
is only
√ one single peak, of width about 8, and centered on a value of about 18 (close
to 2 · 12.5). This is a value substantially larger than the maximum value of the spin
in any direction (12.5). and substantially outside the range of the eigenvalues of the
spin component.

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Fig. 4 Probability of measuring values of spin 12.5 particle if initial Sx and final S y values were 12.5 and
intermediate S(x+y)/√2 measurements had uncertainty 0.02, 1.5, 3.0

Hence, the behaviour of the quantum universe outside the horizon would be sub-
stantially different than its behaviour under quantum mechanics with initial conditions
only.

Where are particles created?

The notion of particle depends on the state of motion of particle detector. Particles are
carriers of energy. In 1974, Davies, Fulling and I [16] calculated the massless field
energy-momentum tensor in (1+1) dimensions. The conformal anomaly, the non-zero
trace of the tensor being proportional to the curvature R, acts as a source for the flux
of energy in 1+1 dimensions. In writing our paper, I pushed for interpretation of the
curvature R as the source of energy flux. It was an argument which did not catch on
with people working in the area. So let me try again to make the argument in a slightly
different way.

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Fig. 5 Non-zero average energy fluxes. Thermal fluxes are depicted in green if positive and in red if negative.
The left figure shows a spatial representation, while the right figure shows a null representation. There are
different states. Hartle–Hawking (HH): No fluxes across horizons, near horizon like Minkowski vacuum.
Boulware (B): No fluxes across infinity, near infinity like Minkowski vacuum. Unruh (U): No fluxes across
past horizon or past infinity, like state from collapsing matter forming black hole

A model of black hole emission

The model [17] will be that of a two flat spacetimes sewn together along a timelike
line which is an accelerated curve in one spacetime, and is a timelike geodesic as seen
from the other spacetime. This junction lies along the coordinate r = 1, where there
is a δ-function curvature (see Fig. 5):

r 2 dt 2 − dr 2 r <1
ds =
2
(10)
dt − dr
2 2 r >1

∂t2 φ − r ∂ (r ∂r φ) = 0 r <1
(11)
∂t2 φ − ∂r2 φ = 0 r >1

In one section, we take (t, r ) as Rindler coordinates, while in the other they are
Minkowski coordinates. The Rindler coordinates have a horizon at r = 0, and are
flat for r > 1. One can now choose a number of quantizations of the scalar field in
these coordinates, corresponding to “vacuums” in eternal Schwarzschild – the Hartle–
Hawking (HH) state, the Boulware state (B), and the Unruh (U) state. The energy
fluxes in these states in this model take the form as in Fig. 5.
This is also true of Dirac field. Is this also true of massive field in 1+1, or of fields
in 3+1 in which the inner metric would be a cylindrical Rindler spacetime, and the
outer would be flat Minkowski spacetime in polar coordinates?
My suspicion is yes. But there are many ways I could be wrong.

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Planck-scale problem

Thermal radiation comes from exponentially super-Planckian scale vacuum fluctua-

5
tions (1 s after solar mass black hole emission comes from amplification of 1010 Hz).
I could argue (and I have) that adiabaticity explains why the super-Planckian origin of
the radiation has no effect. Analog gravity calculations and experiments support this
argument [18, 19]. But can we find a simple derivation of Hawking radiation which
shows this? In black hole thermodynamics the only “reliable” calculation is that which
associates a temperature with black holes. But most people worry about entropy, not
temperature. There is no evidence that temperature has anything to do with Planck-
scale physics, so why would entropy? It would be wonderful to get a derivation of the
back-hole emission which did not rely on super Planckian modes.

Experimental black hole temperature

In 1980, I suggested that it might be possible to carry out experiments in the lab
to see the analog of the quantum instability of black holes. Although slow, this has
become a sizeable area of research. The history of these analogs runs something like
the following:

1972: Oxford – Sonic analog of black holes to give physical feel for black holes.
1980: PRL “Experimental black hole evaporation?” [20]. I tried to call them “dumb
holes” [21] – but that name failed to catch on. This field is now called “Analog
Gravity” [22].
1990: Jacobson – Quantization of sound wave solutions of the inviscid fluid
equations [23].
1995: Numerical solution shows that high-frequency dispersion does not alter the
low-frequency results [24].
Late 1990: With Schützhold and others – many examples of possible experimental
realizations [25].
2010: Weinfurtner et al., stimulated emission of Hawking radiation [18].
2015–2020: Quantized soundwaves in BEC – demonstration of the trans-horizon
entanglement and temperature by Steinhauer [19, 26–28].
2020: Proposed measurement of acceleration temperature with bi-frequency laser
microphone, Weinfurtner et al. [29].

String theory?

Of course, another of the developments in black hole evaporation has been the attempt
to unify string theory with black holes. An example has been AdS/CFT, which has been
used to advance the claim that black hole formation and evaporation is reversible (the
black hole remembers its origins). This is often called the resolution to the “Information
Paradox”.

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I am still far from convinced that there is any such paradox, or that a solution is
needed or is provided by quantum gravity. It is of course possible that quantum gravity
will solve the singularity problem, and that the eventual sate of the universe outside a
black hole is unitarily related to the initial state of the universe before the black hole
formed. For me, it is more probable that black hole entropy is a fundamental feature
of quantum gravity. However, due to time constraints I cannot discuss this in any more
depth.
What is clear is that black hole quantum mechanics is still a far from finished topic.
50 years after that initial discovery by Hawking, which we are celebrating here, there
is still a massive amount that we do not know or understand about black hole quantum
mechanics.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada
for their support of this research throughout the years. I would also thank the Hagler Institute and Marlan
Scully and his group at the IQSE group at Texas A&M University for their support and insights into black
hole evaporation and acceleration temperature which showed me that there was much more to the subject
still to be understood. I would especially thank the organizers of the 2024 Black Hole-Inside and Out
conference, not only for creating this exciting meeting but also for transcribing my talk into this paper. Any
errors and omissions are of course my own.

Data availibility No datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors declare no Conflict of interest.

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