The latest frontier in analogue gravity: New roles for analogue experiments

So far, the philosophy literature has treated analogue experiments as if they have a single goal: to confirm hypotheses about their target systems. But we should not be surprised if analogue experiments are able to do much more than that — even if they fail in their original goal, as several philosophers and physicists have suggested that they inevitably will (Crowther et al. 2019, Wolchover 2016). I argue that recent analogue black hole experiments can, and already have, done much more than confirm the existence of astrophysical Hawking radiation. They are being used to detect instances of a generalized concept of Hawking radiation and to explore their source systems. Both of these new endeavours have already taught us a great deal about the robustness (i.e. multiple realizability, universality, generality) of Hawking radiation and other predicted black hole phenomena. These developments in analogue gravity reveal new roles for analogue experiments in general. They show that analogue experiments, even if unable to confirm the existence of the phenomenon that they were originally designed to detect, often are able to confirm the existence of a more generalized version of that phenomenon. And they show that such analogue experiments can be used as exploratory tools — both for open-ended exploration, and to investigate the generality of some phenomenon or phenomena of interest. The second kind of exploration can be understood as a method of interrogating natural kind boundaries