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baez@galaxy.ucr.edu (John Baez) wrote in message news:... snip > >Presumably an accelerated observer very,very > >close to the horizon (< 1 fm) would see virtual Hawking radiation > >"red" quarks promoted to real red quarks. So that observer would say > >that the black holes "hair" included colour, although for all other > >observers obviously the black hole would be colourless like everything > >else. > > This insane observer would see Hawking radiation containing all > sorts of crud, but no lone quarks (color is confined) and more > importantly, the character of this radiation would be independent > of everything but the mass, angular momentum and charge of the > black hole $- we$ think. But I deliberately chose an observer so small & close to the horizon that from their point-of-view colour is _not_ confined. Colour is only confined on distance scales longer than that where the energy (rising linearly with distance) is less than the creation of a quark-antiquark pair. So I still think that this observer should observe a BH which is colourless on average but with fluctuations. Every time the observer sees the Hawking radiation containing a "red" quark ("crud") the BH is temporarily "anti-red". Until some considerable time later $(~10^-23$ secs later) they see an "anti-red" quark emitted. In fact, just like when they observe a normal proton. I don't know why that observer is "insane". Since when have fundamental laws of the universe, such as which quantities are conserved, depended on the size of the person who wrote the textbook? Similarly, on lepton number. An observer very close to the horizon should observe "all sorts of crud". Including for example electrons and anti-protons. Now, if lepton-number really isn't conserved, then this observer will say that if the BH remains charge-neutral then for every electron observed there should be exactly one anti-proton or positron. But it would only be statistically true that the number of electrons equalled the number of positrons. But if lepton-number is conserved, the number of leptons emitted exactly equals anti-leptons. These are actually two genuinely distinguishable statistical distributions. If we took a histogram of number of leptons emitted then: if lepton number not conserved, then leptons minus antileptons on average diverges as $n^1/2$ as number of particles detected increases. But if lepton number is conserved then it doesn't diverge quite as much (put your hand into bag of 100 red & 100 green balls, after you have withdrawn 60 red & 40 green, what are the odds you draw a red one next time). So this is a scientifically valid, falsifiable question, albeit very difficult experiment. Observe all the particles emitted by Hawking radiation from a BH over at least half of its lifetime, and histogram over time.