New evidence supports Stephen Hawking's theory of shrinking black holes

For a long time, it was assumed that the gravitational pull of a black hole was total — that nothing, not even light, could escape the clutches of its event horizon. Then, in 1974, an up-and-coming physicist named Stephen Hawking made the bold suggestion that thanks to the peculiarities of quantum physics, black holes should actually emit a tiny amount of electromagnetic radiation (known as Hawking Radiation) and slowly shrink over time. Now, an Israeli physicist named Jeff Steinhauer claims to have proven Hawking's theory — by creating an acoustic black hole in the lab.

Steinhauer's black hole is, of course, just a shadow of the real thing. It builds on the proposals of a physicist named Bill Unruh, who suggested in the '80s that...