Is Hawking Radiation Really a Prediction?

We don't have a good microscopic understanding of hawking radiation. People talk about, you know, virtual particles being produced at the edge of a black hole. But we don't understand the gravity of quantum part sso hawking has soro like a statistical argument for why black holes should admit radiation. So he predicts that black holes will glow in the dark, but we don't know how they would glo in the dark. Nobody's ever observed hawking radiation - it would be really, really faint.