  A different reason for the apparent weakness of the gravitational interaction
is advanced, and its consequences for Hawking evaporation of a Schwarzschild
black hole are investigated. A simple analytical formulation predicts that
evaporating black holes will undergo a type of phase transition resulting in
variously long-lived objects of reasonable sizes, with normal thermodynamic
properties and inherent duality characteristics. Speculations on the
implications for particle physics and for some recently-advanced new paradigms
are explored.
