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.
This is where I’m confused! I don’t see any way that anything could cross the horizon, even from its own perspective. If time stops, time stops no matter what. When time does not progress, nothing happens: nothing moves, interacts, or crosses any horizons. On top of this – and I should perhaps have emphasised this point more – given the finite life span of black holes (that is, we assume Hawking radiation is real, so black holes evaporate), anyone approaching the event horizon would observe intense radiation and the horizon would actually recede away from them until it’s all gone, but by then they are themselves part of the radiation.
I think there’s a problem of intuition wrt subjective experience here: we say that when we observe time slowing down for someone somewhere else, they still think that time passes just fine for them but we are the ones being sped up. However, this is not a duality or paradox. These are perfectly compatible perspectives - equivalent even. Whereas someone being slowed down still allows them to have a subjective experience (it only takes longer relative to some hypothetical else’s perspective), someone being permanently frozen in time will seize to experience anything at all, because there are no subsequent moments for them to experience - their existence has come to an end.
So if someone is frozen on the event horizon of a black hole, that’s it. They will have experiences up until that point, but no further. As far as they are concerned, they were perfectly fine the whole time. They just weren’t able to experience their own end, when there was no more time for them to exist in. But as far away observers, we saw what happened: they stopped experiencing. Some physicists present this as some sort of duality of experience but I just don’t see how there can be any disagreement between perspectives.
You don’t get frozen on the event horizon. You appear that way to someone not there, but that’s not your experience. You don’t even notice there being a horizon. Well, besides the immense tidal forces. They may cause you some concern. But yeah, you’ll cross that horizon and hit that singularity in a finite time, and likely one that you think is pretty short. I think the problem in this case lies with you thinking time stops in a black hole. Which likely hasn’t been helped by many beginner physics articles saying that space time stops in black holes. It doesn’t, what does happen is that space time becomes infinitely curved and that fucks with things in a complicated way that can be easily ignored for most things (not astrophysics, obviously).
As for the hawking radiation and the black hole evaporating before you get there, yeah black holes will be like all things in the universe and eventually cease to be, that’s not a problem in this case cos you will be hitting it way quicker than what you’ve hypothesised above. Well, I say that, but as mentioned above the tidal forces are gonna spaghettifi you well before that. Although, depending on the type of black hole you’re in, you can make it past the horizon before this happens. But, again, you won’t notice this. Either way, you’re getting stretched waaaaaaaaay before that black hole is dying. If you do fall in a super massive black hole (one which will allow you cross the horizon before destroying you), you will see some really cool shit when you look back out. There will be blueshifting of the stars, they’ll change shape, some will move at different rates. Wild.
Edit: here’s a fun little answer that answers the first part way better than me. Also covers the space time curvature more accurately than I have: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/48026/in-general-relativity-gr-does-time-stop-at-the-event-horizon-or-in-the-centra
Excellent, this is precisely the perspective I want to understand! Let me try to pick this apart so that I may figure out why we disagree.
This is an interesting statement, because in my understanding, you most certainly would. Maybe not in practice, for the same reasons you might not notice if your brain undergoes rapid deterioration for any other reason. But in theory, if we assume that the object in question is a composite of multiple non-overlapping particles (fermions) interacting with each other, eventually particles closer to the event horizon would get close enough to it that they become unable to interact with particles further away in finite time.
What that means in practice for, say, a human brain, is that it would become subject to an increasingly extreme time dilation gradient, preventing it from functioning properly. The part of the brain that (for the sake of argument) passes the event horizon would simply become inaccessible to the part of it that’s still outside. The constituent particles of the part that’s inside would, again for the sake of argument, be subject to some absurd conditions: while particle interactions in our everyday spacetime are local and propagated at the speed of light in all spatial directions, inside some hypothetical black hole interior, all trajectories would converge to the same point and never point (much less intersect) in opposite directions to each other. Thus, no mutual causal interaction between any two things would be possible.
That’s not quite it. I think time does not progress at the event horizon. In order to enter the black hole, you would need to first go through the event horizon. But if time does not pass at the event horizon, you couldn’t possibly keep going any further if you were to reach it. If you start counting – “one, two, three, …” – out loud, you would exclaim “…, infinity!” before observing the first particle of your body passing through the horizon, and that’s just not going to happen. In effect, you just wouldn’t ever experience getting closer to the horizon after a certain point; you’d see it evaporating away from you for the rest of your life, however brief that is.
If what I said above is correct, the black hole would cease to be long before I reach the horizon. As a thought experiment, consider an eternal observer that doesn’t fall into the black hole. That observer would attest to the fact that the black hole evaporates long before I ever enter it, because it would evaporate in finite time whereas it would take an infinite amount of time for me to reach the event horizon.
This is what I thought too until just a few moments ago, but then I realised that this would only be true if (and only for as long as) you were accelerating away from the black hole. If you merely “free fall” towards it, I believe you would actually observe a redshifted universe behind you, since your relative velocity would approach the speed of light the closer you get to the horizon.
Jesus… Strong way to start a comment I know, but I literally just had some weed cos I’ve not nothing else to do tonight and this is heavy…
Okay, first one. No, you wouldn’t notice the event horizon at all. Particles don’t interact like that at the event horizon. They do at the singularity, but not the horizon. I also think your concept of how time works in this case is wrong. The traditional way we conceive time just doesn’t work in these instances. Hell, our understanding of physics breaks down in a lot of instances in this scenario. I could go into more depth about this, but there are literally hundreds of articles out there that talk about this way more clearly than I can. Here’s a good one: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/327323/understanding-time-dilation-at-the-event-horizon
Second point is covered in the article given above. Essentially “time doesn’t work like that in this scenario”. Cos time 100% passes in a black hole. It doesn’t escape, but it does progress. Sure, it’s all warped and shit cos spacetime is super fucked up in a black hole, but it still happens. You can’t just ignore a fundamental law of the universe. Black holes are weird, but they’re not omnipotent and above the laws of the universe.
Third point. I mean, you said yourself “if what I’ve said is correcr”. It’s not, sooooooo. Those black holes are gonna take billions of years to cease to be. You are gonna cease to be via spaghetiffication well before then. You are right in that to an observer outside of the event horizon, you’d be stuck there forever though.
Fourth point. Now, this gets a bit dicey for me cos this kinda shit always confused me… Buttttttttt, the way I understand is that cos spacetime gets all bunched up there, it causes everything to blueshift because it appears as if everything is moving towards you, even though you are actually moving away from it. Again, there’s plenty of articles out there that describe this phenomenon, and do it better than me, but I’m trying to explain how I understand it.
Sorry for any shit answers here, I know that I haven’t covered what you want fully, but there is literally a shit load of research on this out there. If you need more help with this, I can at least find you some articles on it, even if I can’t explain them properly myself hahahahaha.
Well the coherence of your response is impressive despite the weed :) I appreciate your input and references. I really need to finish the book I have sitting next to me (Spacetime and Geometry, by Sean Carroll) so that I can show my reasoning and either refute or prove the validity of my concerns.
I think we’re still talking past each other a little bit here, because all explanations I’m able to find all seem to spherical-cow the whole thing and use a different set of premises from the ones I’ve laid out. For example, the top answer in the linked question focuses on the simple trajectory of an infalling point-like classical particle in general relativity. That’s not the situation I’m imagining.
These are the premises I’m able to identify as central to my reasoning - feel free to let me know if they are objectionable:
The time dilation gradient (given by the stress-energy tensor) approaches infinity in the vicinity of the event horizon.Infalling matter appears forever frozen just outside the event horizon to any observer at any distance further out.The reason for (1) is more philosophical than mathematical and has to do with the (lack of) ontological status I assign to a causally isolated, static system. A single “particle” on its own has no subjective experience because there’s no experience to be had without interactions taking place. I guess you could consider this as another premise, but I don’t think there could be any reasonable objection to this point of view, so I consider it more of an uncontroversial a priori conclusion based on the meaning of words like “experience” or “observation”. So in order to talk about “the experience of falling into a black hole” we must necessarily think about what happens to a spatially distributed system of “particles” (or however we might want to model what we think of as particles; fields, strings, or probability distributions work just as well).
So with these premises, let’s think of the extremely simple case of two particles, A and B, falling towards a Schwarzschild black hole. This is our setup:
What happens to our observer, A⊗B, as r₁ approaches 1?
Given premise (2) (and as we have already established before), from the perspective of any remote observer, O⊆E, it takes longer and longer for interactions between our two particles to make a round-trip right up until either A or B is radiated off into space as the black hole inevitably evaporates (premise 3), at which point A⊗B can no longer be said to meaningfully exist as its own system.
Let’s take premise (2) and consider what happens to A⊗B from the perspective of A⊗B. Well, their interaction slows down and approaches complete stagnation, but since our frame of reference is that of the interactions between A and B we won’t notice anything strange going on here. But if r₁ < r₂, then eventually B⊗E will attest to the fact that A fades and becomes frozen in time, never reaching the horizon for as long as any X⊆(B⊗E) is around to witness A’s ever-fading signature and inevitable conversion into Hawking radiation (or whatever).
It may seem like I’m just reverting to the perspective of an outside observer when I said we’d focus on A⊗B, and that isn’t entirely wrong. It is in fact an observation that is central to the point I’m trying to make: there exists no observer’s frame of reference from which you can say “I crossed the event horizon”. This event just doesn’t happen to a physical system, because a physical system is composed of an interaction network smeared across space and there is never a time when any part of that network can reasonably say that it now exists inside the event horizon. The event horizon will recede before that (again, premise 3).
Edit: Cleaned up premise (1), modified premise (2), and removed some unnecessary symbols.
Fucking hell… Again, not a reflection on you, but I’ve had more weed and a number of beers since my last comment and fuck me… Um, this is beyond me at the moment. I suck at visualising shit at the best of times (I have that thing where you can’t do it. I don’t dream with pictures either. Just all my other senses. Apparently that makes me “odd, but I’d like to experience that once”) and this stuff needs a bunch of it, and I’m so relaxed I can’t be bothered getting up and getting paper and pencil so I can even sketch some shit out to help… I’ve read what you’ve written a couple of times though and feel confident saying this much, spaghettification will still get you way before the black hole dies. I’ve also emailed this to a couple of friends. They’re all physics PhDs. One of is a literal astrophysicist.they likely won’t reply for weeks cos that’s what all of us do, but they will reply. And also, just all this in general, this is why of the 20+ people I know who did post graduate studies in physics most ended up becoming philosophers. It’s kinda wild watching them interact on Facebook. A simple photo of a dog can turn into a 500+ message thread that goes for three weeks…
Ah interesting! Aphantasia?
Oh, that’s exciting! I hope I haven’t embarrassed myself 😅
Again, I really appreciate your responses :)
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!
After thinking and reading some more, I’m updating my perspective a little. I think premise (2) is objectionable, actually: it’s not fair to say that matter approaching the event horizon will appear frozen to any observer. What is true is that matter approaching the event horizon will appear frozen to an observer sufficiently far away. But to an observer at any intermediate distance there is merely significant time dilation.
With that in mind, my reasoning as stated has to be slightly modified, but the conclusion remains the same: I don’t see how one could ever cross the event horizon. The more I think about it the more distilled the reason becomes in my mind: no matter what, the black hole will always evaporate faster than you anything could ever fall into it.
At least, that’s where I am now.
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Haha, no worries. Don’t need to know a lot about something in order to participate in conversations about it. I’d have to permanently shut up if that were the case.
If Hawking radiation is a thing then (thanks to our expanding universe always dissipating more heat over time) I don’t see how any black hole could not evaporate eventually.