Conversation

No, no, no. These guys - Falcke, Wondrak and van Suijlekom - claim that heavy things emit Hawking radiation even if they're not black holes. Now they're getting more publicity by claiming this means the universe will fizzle out sooner than we expected.

If experts thought this had even a chance of being true, it would be the biggest thing since sliced bread! Everyone working on quantum gravity would be writing papers about it, because if true it would be revolutionary. It would overturn calculations by Hawking, Unruh and many other experts. It would open up a whole new subject!

But in fact, their work has had almost zero effect on physics. There's one short rebuttal, here:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.229001

It explains that these guys used a crude approximation that gives wrong results even in a simpler problem.

But plenty of science journalists don't bother interviewing actual experts anymore: they just believe the press releases. So now, if you ask your favorite large language model, it will say

"Yes, the work of Michael F. Wondrak, Walter D. van Suijlekom, and Heino Falcke has been accepted by the physics community."

It may cite as evidence the fact that their work got published in decent journals, which means very little. Sigh.

One of many lazy articles:

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-end-of-the-universe-may-not-be-as-far-off-as-once-thought