We Don't Need No Stinkin' Black Holes IV

Lubos has a new post which links to a year old one on my favorite crackpot notion. I haven't yet read the Champline papers he references, so I don't know if his ideas fit into the ones I like or not, but it doesn't really look like it.

UPDATE: There are two interesting ideas in the Champline paper for me. One is the analogy to sound in a superfluid, and the second is a reference to a paper
D. Boulware, Phy. Rev. D11, 1404 (1975).
that allegedly shows that QM Greens Functions are necessarily funky at a horizon. I don't know how to evaluate either of these ideas, but a lot of people, including 't Hooft have speculated on funky behavior near a horizon. Lumo suggests that Champline doesn't like Hawking radiation, but I feel sure [at the blind prejudice level] that it has to be involved at the fundamental level.

For a large mass, freely falling through a horizon is supposedly a pretty nothing experience. On the other hand, parking near one should be extremely hot due to the Hawking radiation. The question in my mind is what the experience is like at the time of formation. In particular, what about an almost black hole - a mass that is just barely larger than it's Schwarzschild radius - does it produce anything like Hawking radiation?

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