Page 24 - BusinessWest November 24, 2025

College >>Continued from page 22
year — typically four to five classes —
develop some affiliation with the insti-
tution, and be able to take some inde-
pendent coursework and things very
specific to their planned major, so it’s
not just, ‘oh, I come to campus for one
class and then leave. Instead, they’re
thinking about being on campus most
of the day for Tuesday and Thursday, or
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”
He also appreciates the Healey
administration’s focus on equity and
helping close performance gaps.
Black Hole >>Continued from page 23
“That’s one of the reasons why we
applied for this designation with SEZP
and the Department of Higher Edu-
cation. We’re really centering equity
efforts. We don’t always want to polish
just the shiniest of apples, but we’re
making sure we’re reaching out to that
student who may not have thought of
college as an option — but help them
do it in ways that make sense. That’s
why we start small, one or two courses
freshman year, then building up inten-
tionally and bringing them into the fold
in college.
“We’re really thankful for the sup-
port from SEZP and the Department
of Higher Education, and we value the
partnership we have with Duggan and
the Springfield Public Schools,” Dodge
went on. “We think it’s a partnership
that makes sense in this current envi-
ronment, this academic cliff where
fewer 18-year-olds are going to college.
It seems like what the future of higher
education needs to be.” BW
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Presented By:
Joaquim Iguaz Juan, a postdoctoral
researcher in physics at UMass
Amherst. “We can see it with our cur-
rent crop of telescopes, and because
the only black holes that can explode
today or in the near future are these
PBHs, we know that, if we see Hawk-
ing radiation, we are seeing an explod-
ing PBH.”
Asking the Right
Questions
Though physicists since Hawking’s
time have thought that the chances of
seeing an exploding PBH are infini-
tesimally slight, Iguaz Juan noted that
“our job as physicists is to question
the received assumptions, to ask bet-
ter questions, and come up with more
precise hypotheses.”
The team’s new hypothesis? Get
ready now to see the explosion. “We
believe that there is up to a 90%
chance of witnessing an exploding
PBH in the next 10 years,” says Aidan
Symons, one of the paper’s co-authors
and a graduate student in physics at
UMass Amherst.
In its work, the team explores a
‘dark-QED toy model.’ This is essen-
tially a copy of the usual electric force
as known, but which includes a very
heavy, hypothesized version of the
electron, which the team calls a ‘dark
electron.’
The team then reconsidered long-
held assumptions about the electrical
charge of black holes. Standard black
holes have no charge, and it was
assumed that PBHs are likewise elec-
trically neutral.
“We make a different assumption,”
said Michael Baker, co-author and
an assistant professor of Physics at
UMass Amherst. “We show that, if a
primordial black hole is formed with
a small, dark electric charge, then the
toy model predicts that it should be
temporarily stabilized before finally
exploding.”
Taking all known experimental
data into account, the team found that
a PBH explosion could potentially
be observed not once every 100,000
years, as previously thought, but once
every 10 years.
“We’re not claiming that it’s abso-
lutely going to happen this decade,
but there could be a 90% chance
that it does,” Baker said. “Since
we already have the technology to
observe these explosions, we should
be ready.”
Added Iguaz Juan, “this would be
the first-ever direct observation of both
Hawking radiation and a PBH. We
would also get a definitive record of
every particle that makes up everything
in the universe. It would completely
revolutionize physics and help us
rewrite the history of the universe.” BW
24 << EDUCATION >>
NOVEMBER 24, 2025
Business W est