The popular explanation of Hawking radiation — in which virtual particle pairs are born near the event horizon, the horizon tears them apart, one particle falls in with negative energy and the other escapes — has become the canonical image of black hole physics since Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" (1988). This paper subjects that picture to systematic quantitative and conceptual scrutiny using Sagittarius A* as a concrete test case. We present four quantitative checks and a thought experiment with three observers that together expose fundamental failures of the popular picture: (1) the predicted radiation composition contradicts the thermal spectrum — electron-positron pairs cannot be produced at temperatures 24 orders of magnitude below the pair-creation threshold; (2) the naive count of virtual particles in a Planck-thickness shell near the horizon (~10⁸⁹) implies radiation power exceeding the luminosity of the observable Universe by 46 orders of magnitude, while the actual Hawking luminosity is ~10⁻⁴² W; (3) the characteristic wavelength of emitted photons (~79 Schwarzschild radii ≈ 6.3 AU for Sgr A*) precludes localization of any "pair" at the horizon; (4) no physical mechanism determines which particle escapes, and classical mechanics in such a gravitational field predicts capture of both particles with zero net mass change. A Gedankenexperiment with three observers — distant, freely falling, and hovering — yields three independent contradictions: a 137-order-of-magnitude power discrepancy, violation of the equivalence principle (experimentally verified to 10⁻¹⁵), and attribution of radiation to the horizon rather than to the observer's acceleration (Unruh effect). We further show that any real black hole in the present Universe absorbs cosmic microwave background radiation at a rate exceeding its Hawking emission by 58 orders of magnitude, rendering "evaporation" astrophysically meaningless for the foreseeable cosmic future. Hawking's original 1975 calculation via Bogoliubov transformations — which contains no virtual pairs and no local process at the horizon — remains unchallenged. What fails is the popularized ontology grafted onto it thirteen years later. This is the second in a series of articles demonstrating that literal interpretation of virtual particles as physical entities produces contradictions across quantum physics — from the Casimir effect to black hole radiation to the cosmological constant problem.
Igor Postanovsky (Fri,) studied this question.