[windsurfer]

If you had a small black hole in a lab you could generate power from the hawking radiation, likely enough to power the entire world. A 1,000,000 ton black hole would last over a thousand years without feeding it more mass and produce about 300 TW of energy (increasing over time, so you better keep feeding it). You'd also need some pretty good sunglasses to be able to watch things being thrown into it. Also I'm not sure how you could throw anything into it given the amount of radiation pressure... Maybe a dedicated particle accelerator could do it.

Anything smaller while also lasting long enough to do an experiment on and you'd likely end up producing too much energy and destroying the planet.

[api]

Unfortunately when your power source black hole got smaller it would get hotter, finally reaching runaway at the end and detonating with hundreds of times the power of the Tsar Bomba.

[AtlasBarfed]

So the hawking radiation is so strong that it impedes matter falling into the hole?

And can you charge the hole with enough of a charge to use electromagnetism to move and contain it?

[andrewflnr]

Do note that that's a bit speculative. We haven't actually observed hawking radiation. And Hawking radiation definitely isn't what slows feeding in astronomical black holes, but radiation from the gas heating up as it falls.

[windsurfer]

Yes the event horizon would be smaller than the width of a proton. Good luck getting anything into that with 300 TW of gamma rays coming out of it.