Q: Is it possible to destroy a black hole?

The original question was: Aside from Hawking radiation, is it possible to destroy a black hole? Specifically, could you rotate a black hole fast enough that it was flung apart? Also, assuming that m is the mass necessary for a black hole (though I realize they’re more a density than mass thing), and you had a black hole of, say, 10m, could you throw some amount of anti matter at it (say 5m) to rip it apart without simply converting all it’s matter into energy?

Physicist: Black holes are a little tricky.  Rather than thinking of them as solid objects, it’s better to think of them as “messed up patches of geometry”.  Destroying a black hole is just as difficult as destroying any patch of space.  So, if by setting off a bomb you could change how rulers measure distance in a particular region of space, then you could affect a black hole.

Chucking anti-matter into a black hole would actually make it bigger.  Anti-matter, as the named doesn’t imply, is made of the same “stuff” as ordinary matter.  That is, if you were made of anti-matter, everything about you would be exactly the same (there are some subtleties with regard to neutrino emission, but who notices that?).  The big thing that makes matter and anti-matter different is that bringing them together makes them cancel each other out, dumping all of their intrinsic energy (of the “E=MC²” variety) into a big boom.

Even if it did contact some matter inside, there’s no direction the explosion could go that doesn’t point toward the center.  Beyond the event horizon all directions point down (and that’s messed up geometry).

Another way to look at it is; gravity is generated by both matter and energy, so converting a black hole’s matter into energy wouldn’t change much.  You still have the same amount of matter/energy, and thus the same amount of gravity.

A spinning black hole can (in theory) produce a naked singularity, and maybe there’s something that can be done with that (most theories don’t have many definitive things to say about singularities), but probably not.  Black holes are pretty tough.