Hawking has discovered almost 40 years ago that black holes (BH’s) burn.
Ever since, ideas about how they burn have been a source of constant interest and controversy. In Hawking’s model, the process of BH evaporation respects the equivalence principle but it is not unitary. Page has proposed a model of unitary evaporation. However, this class of models was recently found to be incompatible with the equivalence principle. After reviewing this state of affairs, I will argue that the origin for many of the difficulties is that BH’s are treated as infinite mass objects and thus
their quantum fluctuations are completely ignored. I will present a model of how finite mass BH’s burn and outline how both unitarity and the equivalence principle can be respected within the model.
