Now admittedly it is only a sonic black hole, but the principle is the same: the sound waves inside the hole can’t travel fast enough to get out. Also it needed a Bose-Einstein condensate to build it, so it is serious stuff. Jennifer Ouellette has an introductory post here, and Sean Carroll wonders about the possibility of observing Hawking phonons.

Of course now I’m wondering about getting Dr. Michael Berry to BristolCon…