In light of the fact that Hawking radiation is practically empirically undetectable, physicists have attempted to establish the effect as universal — as a phenomenon that should appear regardless of the possible details of quantum gravity, whatever those details might be. But, as pointed out in a recent article by Gryb, Palacios, and Thébault [1], these universality arguments for Hawking radiation seem broadly unconvincing compared to the Wilsonian renormalization-group universality arguments for condensed matter physics. Motivated by their apparent failure, compared with the overwhelming success of universality arguments in so many other contexts, I address the question: in which situations should we expect to be able to construct successful universality arguments? In other words, which situations are universality-argument-apt? I distinguish between two notions of success for a universality argument: strength and relevance. I argue that we should only expect to be able to construct universality arguments that are successful in the sense of being significantly relevant to a given domain if (1) we know enough about how that domain’s micro-physics is structured, or (2) we are able to empirically test the domain’s macrobehaviour, or if we are in both situations at once. These conditions are useful, most obviously, as a clarification of what universality arguments are capable of. But I argue that they are also useful for two less direct reasons: they clarify the status of analogue experimentation, and thereby show us where we stand in our search for empirical confirmation of Hawking radiation.

中文翻译：

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将理论置于其位置：普遍性论证与经验约束之间的关系

鉴于霍金辐射实际上在经验上是无法检测到的，物理学家试图将这种效应确立为普遍现象——无论量子引力的可能细节如何，无论这些细节是什么，这种现象都应该出现。但是，正如 Gryb、Palacios 和 Thébault [1] 在最近的一篇文章中所指出的，与凝聚态物理学的威尔逊重整化群普遍性论点相比，这些霍金辐射的普遍性论点似乎缺乏说服力。受其明显失败的启发，与在许多其他情况下普遍性论证的压倒性成功相比，我提出了一个问题：我们应该期望在哪些情况下能够构建成功的普遍性论证？换句话说，哪些情况适合普遍性论证？我区分了普遍性论证的两个成功概念：强度和相关性。我认为，如果（1）我们对该领域的微观物理结构有足够的了解，或者（2）我们能够凭经验测试域的宏观行为，或者我们是否同时处于这两种情况。最明显的是，这些条件有助于澄清普遍性论证的能力。但我认为它们也有两个不太直接的原因：它们阐明了模拟实验的状态，从而向我们展示了我们在寻找霍金辐射的经验证实时所处的位置。