Speaker
Description
I give a heuristic overview of the emission of radiation by black holes when quantum effects are taken into account---the "Hawking effect". I shall not work through any particular derivation of the effect in detail, as the rough, intuitive ones tend to be badly misleading, and the precise, rigorous ones are too technically demanding given the constraints of this talk. I shall rather sketch the basic ingredients any derivation requires, the choices one must make in constructing a derivation, including what exactly it is one hopes to show, and discuss physical and conceptual problems those ingredients and conclusions raise and face. I focus on apparent inconsistencies among several of the most popular approaches, and how they may (or may not) be resolved.
