Crossing The Event Horizon Of A Black Hole Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 711, 712-3):

The event horizon is not made of any material substance. It is merely a particular (hyper)surface in spacetime, separating those places from which signals can escape to external infinity from those places from which all signals would inevitably be trapped by the black hole. A hapless observer who falls through the event horizon, from the outside to the inside, would not notice anything locally peculiar just as the horizon is crossed. Moreover, the black hole itself is not a ponderable body; we think of it merely as a gravitating region of spacetime from within which no signal can escape. …

As noted above, an observer in a space ship would notice nothing particular happening as the horizon is crossed from the outside to the inside. Yet, as soon as that perilous journey has been undertaken, there is no return … there is no escape, and the observer would encounter rapidly increasing tidal effects (spacetime curvature) that diverge to infinity at the spacetime singularity at the centre (r = 0).

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the curvature of spacetime is actually the curvature of the geodesic, the shortest trajectory through space, due to the relative contraction of space intervals in the direction of the centre of a massive body. So the event horizon of a black hole is the outermost distance from the centre of a black hole at which the geodesic is so curved that the trajectory of light remains within that distance from the black hole centre. Because of this, no events within this horizon can be observed from outside the horizon, so as an observer crosses the event horizon, they cease to be observable to those outside the event horizon.

In this view of General Relativity, the singularity at the centre of a black hole is the point at which space intervals theoretically contract to zero and time intervals theoretically expand to infinity, though the space contraction may be physically limited to the Planck length, and the time expansion to its correlate.

According to General Relativity, a black hole must include a concentration of mass, since it is mass that contracts the space, and since energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it must also include all the energy that flows into it.