Do Events Inside Black Holes Happen?
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as an accessible but deep explanation of black holes that corrects popular misconceptions.
What it is
A PBS Space Time episode asking what black holes really are and whether events can happen inside them. It covers event horizons, time dilation and common misconceptions about black holes.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2016 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec pwaai · 2018-02 · on “Eldar Black Holes”
> [this video] This is mind blowing...shatters my misconception of blackholes....is there any more books on this?
Recommends grondilu · 2018-02 · on “Eldar Black Holes”
There is a fascinating PBS Space Time video[1] about black holes that questions the very existence of whatever is "inside" a black hole. They point out that as you approach a black hole, your proper time is advancing slower and slower when compared to an observer located far away from the black hole (like us, on Earth). That means that from the point of view of this far observer, nothing happens inside a black hole until an infinite amount of time. In other words, what is inside a black hole is separated from us not by a space-like frontier, but a time-like one. Events behind the event horizon are postponed to "the end of times". Does it even make sense to say that those events exist, then?
Recommends grkvlt · 2018-02 · on “Most images of black holes are illustrations. Here’s what our telescopes capture”
A better way of thinking about the event horizon is that it is the boundary beyond which events happening cannot be assigned a 'when' in our universe - i.e. the object falling 'in' to the black hole is never seen to pass this horizon, but to the object it seems that they do, however those events happen to it after an infinite time in our universe, i.e. never, due to time dilation. The contents of a black hole are the events that occur outside/after our universe relative to that boundary. I found these explanations on an awesome PBS youtube video [0] about black holes and space-time. 0. [this video]
Recommends drewrv · 2018-10 · on “Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?”
The youtube channel PBS Spacetime has some really great videos about how black holes work, I would start with this one: [this video]
Recommends czbond · 2019-01 · on “Black Hole Evolution Traced Out with Loop Quantum Gravity”
PBS Spacetime is a great series, and delves deep enough for interested layman as well as practitioners to be interested. I find the videos really good. Here is a link to one of many on black holes. [this video]
Cites stcredzero · 2016-05 · on “How to destroy the Earth (2006)”
You talk about "the singularity" as if it exists. For all we know, that could be a mathematical fiction due to our limited understanding. The Event Horizon as we currently understand it might as well be the demarcation to a separate universe. We have no access to any information from the events beyond it. [this video]
Cites drewrv · 2021-06 · on “Physicists confirm two cases of “elusive” black hole/neutron star mergers”
I don’t fully understand it, but I believe the way to think about it is that: we never “see” something fall into a black hole. But the photons from the “last moment we see” get so redshifted they’re essentially invisible. Therefore from a reasonable distance it “looks” like the object disappeared and the event horizon grew in size. Here’s a video, he talks about the redshift around the 8 minute mark. [this video]