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Hawking's Knot |
The Hawking's Knot is a power generation system consisting of a quantum black hole nested in a complex geometry of small-scale Pitch field generators. The black hole's mass in controlled in such a fashion that it is near its evaporation point, and thus producing prodigious amounts of Hawking radiation.
When the Knot is "closed" or "tied," the pitch field works to redirect the flow of radiation back into the hole, thus maintaining its mass and preventing it from evaporating completely. When the knot is "opened," the Pitch field is modulated to segregate antiparticles from particles and channel these away from the knot to receiver/storage devices. Since this results in a decrease in the mass of the black hole, a constant stream of "feeder" particles is required to prevent the Knot from evaporating. As matter and antimatter are produced in roughly equal quantities through the evaporation process, the action of the system is to effectively convert constant streams of normal matter into equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
Well constructed Hawking Knots are fairly stable given a steady supply of fuel to counterbalance their loss of mass due to output and internal maintenance operations. They are operable by societies far below the level of technological sophistication required to produce them, and can provide a ready, cheap means of antimatter mass production.
One should be careful, though, not to "starve" the knot. Otherwise, the Knot may succumb to a runaway evaporation of its black hole. As radiation pressure overcomes the gravitational forces holding the Pitch field geometry intact, the black hole loses mass at a higher and higher rate, radiating more and more intensely as it does, until it finally vanishes in a burst of gamma rays. Anyone interested in surviving such an event should be far away from the Knot when this happens.
