Tl;dr: Someone please explain to me why some physicists think something could ever cross the event horizon of a black hole.
There is a conflict between my understanding of what the event horizon of a black hole is vs the way that many theoretical physicists talk about them.
I understand that a result in general relativity is that time progresses more slowly in the presence of energy, and this is why light bends around massive objects.
The way I understand the dynamics around a black hole is that the surface of an event horizon is the region of space where the energy is so great that time literally grinds totowards a halt (edit/clarification: from the perspective of an observer farther out). Light moves at the speed of causality, and when causality slows down, so does light. Light is bent and redshifted due to time dilation, and only when time stops does the wavelength of light go to zero. That’s the event horizon as I understand it.
If an object falls towards a black hole, it shouldn’t matter if we are that object or if we’re just observing it from farther away, everyone should agree that it never crosses the boundary of the event horizon.
From a spectating observer’s perspective, the object is redshifted until it fades entirely as it gradually stops moving through time (so light stops being emitted from it). But it will only ever approach the boundary asymptotically; it will never cross it.
From the perspective of the object itself, the universe around it will progressively speed up and the entirety of the history of the universe will play out behind it (Edit: that only happens if the object accelerates to remain stationary). An infinite amount of time would pass everywhere else before it crosses the horizon. Now, that will never happen if black holes evaporate in finite time (and we have good reason to think they do). The black hole will evaporate long before any eternity passes anywhere. The more slowly you move through time, the faster this process will appear to you. When you are more or less frozen in time, the black hole will be evaporating at a rate that approaches ‘instantaneously’ - so the closer you get to it, the hotter it will appear and the faster it evaporates. You and everything else would literally radiate away from this noticeably shrinking event horizon before ever crossing it.
So, in this view, I feel utterly confused by physicists talking about “what it’s like to cross the event horizon” or “what the interior of a black hole is like”. Either my understanding is incorrect, or these physicists are just indulging themselves with hypotheticals rather than thinking about physics (or working on alternative models where black holes are fundamentally nothing like what I describe).
It’s most likely me not understanding this properly, so… what am I missing?
Update
As I mentioned in this comment, it has been shown that an event horizon may never form at all, and that all one ever sees is a shell of fading signatures followed by radiation from all the matter that falls into it.
I have more to learn about the particular dynamics around the area surrounding a black hole, but I believe I’ve managed to reduce my antecedents to the assumption that quantum information is conserved and the following counterfactuals, which appear promisingly independent of whichever dynamical model one might prefer:
- A sufficiently long-lived asymptotic (sufficiently distant) observer would be able to identify a particular point in time at which a black hole will have fully evaporated.
- A sufficiently long-lived asymptotic observer would be able to track the signature of something falling towards a black hole until it is radiated out.
Counterfactual (1) is supported by the prediction of Hawking radiation and means that the black hole has a finite life span. Counterfactual (2) is supported by the common claim that, to an observer far away, the wavelength of emitted light from an infalling object will go towards infinity as they get closer to the event horizon.
This means that the observer just has to wait long enough to detect each subsequent photon until the source of the emission has been radiated out, and so the observer is a witness of the fact that the infalling object was never inside the event horizon. For information to be conserved, there can never be disagreement between the objective experience of the witness and the information encoded in the radiation, and so if the infalling observer were to be reconstructed after being spat back out by the black hole, it would agree that it was never inside the horizon.
Feedback on my reasoning would be very welcome.
That’s the one. I have ADHD, I can’t remember what day of the week it is let alone that name! Which annoys me, cos before I got real bad I memorised the periodic table, the bones in the body, all that shit. But now, even with the meds I’m basically useless. I’m just glad I found a labouring job where I can use my brain as well as my muscles.
And no embarassment. Although, I would like to tell you a tale of how this convo unfolded for me… Your initial post “they’re not an idiot, but they are a bit clueless”. Comment I initially commented on “not clueless, just confused”. Same for the rest of the comments. That last one? “Okay, what the fuck, where did this come from. I recognise enough of this to know that this person may have been baiting me cos they know more than they let on”. Although, you may have just been struggling to apply those other things you dropped in that last message initially. But I mean, the way you did it, if you did do it, I don’t mind.
Just for context. I’m a pathologist/zoology major. Not a physicist in the slightest. Did do the first unit of first year physics at uni cos whilst I knew what two majors I wanted in my degree early, my uni demanded I still do a minor. So know a bit that way. Plus, that astrophysicist I mentioned above? I dated her for nearly 2yrs. Sat in on a bunch of her PhD lectures cos free education plus we could write notes to each other.
I have ADD and relate a lot to what you say :)/:( I’m a complete autodidact and that really screws with people’s preconceived notions of what I might know based on how I express my ideas, because I jump all over the place and sometimes skip over some basic prerequisite knowledge that later proves… prerequisite. I’ve always had a predisposition to just get the gist of something and then move onto the “juicy stuff”, but sometimes the gist isn’t quite right and that can result in mixed signals when I appear to know things that are more advanced and technical but I’m totally off on some basic but crucial details here and there.
The downsides of the way I operate are clear: communication is harder; it’s harder to identify holes in my understanding; it’s easy to sound arrogant and presumptuous because I identify with a certain level of knowledge but fail to actually qualify as truly learned in a subject; etc. But on the upside it teaches me to be more careful in how I ask questions and seek to correct my understanding, and sometimes I actually appreciate not having been moulded by the formal education that every academic has to go through. In my experience, (and not to sound like a crackpot but) many that excel in formal education don’t stray far enough in exploring the space of possibilities and fail to think carefully about things they have been taught to take for granted. Many academics mistake stories told through some mathematical formalism for the fundamental nature of things.
I was certainly not (consciously) baiting you, and I do struggle a lot with knowing what information is most important to communicate and at what level it should be communicated. For this reason I really appreciate a back-and-forth where I can iterate and expand on the bits that others find important. I’m happy that you’re sharing your impressions and experiences because that way I can hope to improve!