Thread: Do you ever die when you fall into a black hole?

I read a report on black holes and it said once you get to a certain point inside of the black hole, time stops. It just gets slower and slower until it stops moving inside of the black hole. Is it possible to remain living inside of the black hole forever in your own perspective, in immense pain?

I have a sneaking suspicion that you'd be dead long before you reached the center. Probably something to do with the ultra intense, star-destroying gravity.

Originally Posted by DuB

I have a sneaking suspicion that you'd be dead long before you reached the center. Probably something to do with the ultra intense, star-destroying gravity.

time doesn't reach infinity at the center though, its somewhere in the middle.

You would be dead long before even getting close to a black hole. They swallow galaxies.

Not necessarily.

A large black hole wouldn't kill you, but a small one would.

To answer the question, general relativity says that the person falling takes a finite amount of time to hit the singularity. However, an outside observer will think it took infinite time to happen.

I read Stephen Hawking book A brief history of time. In the book he argued that when you enter a black hole the arrow of time flips, so basically you would remeber the future and so could for example you will know your going to die. He argued this is due to thermodynamics and how the psychology arrow of time is just thermodynamics arrow of time. Anyway, however at the end he argued this is a mistake and that a contracting universe is not the symmetrical to a expanding universe, so the arrow of time does not flip in a black hole.

Saying that it would be cool if it did, as you would remeber getting ripped to pieces when you enter a black hole.

Anyway, so the psychological arrow of time is just entropy.

I'd prefer to say causality.

Originally Posted by wendylove

Anyway, so the psychological arrow of time is just entropy.

I always thought entropy was Joules / kilogram * kelvin or meters^2 / second^2 * kelvin
interesting units for an arrow of time

In thermodynamics it's used as a measure of disorder, or of reversibility in a process. Entropy can only be created, it can't be destroyed, so if a process were reversible no entropy would be generated. Entropy is created when any process has irreversibilities, which all do.

As an arrow of time, entropy would point towards ever growing chaos and disorder. That actually makes sense for it to be the psychological arrow of time too, because with each new memory we form, there is more disorder in our heads.

I read a report on black holes and it said once you get to a certain point inside of the black hole, time stops. It just gets slower and slower until it stops moving inside of the black hole

If i remember correctly time doesn't stop inside a black hole, it just appears that way to outside observers.

Since when are outside observers wrong?

Actually, neither the outside observer, nor the one in the blackhole would be wrong. To the one going into the black hole, time would seem to go alone perfectly normal. But because the outside observers are not being sucked into the black hole, to them it would look like time has stopped, when in reality, you'd already be spaghetified.