Falling Into Black Holes — Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 713):

For a black hole of a few solar masses, the tidal forces would be easily enough to kill a person long before the horizon is even reached, let alone crossed, but for the large black holes of 10⁶M⊙, or more, that are believed to inhabit galactic centres, there would be no particular problem from tidal effects as the horizon is crossed (the horizon being some millions of kilometres across). In fact, for our own galaxy, the curvature at the horizon of its central black hole is only about twenty times the spacetime curvature here at the surface of the Earth — which we don’t even notice! Yet, the relentless dragging of the observer inwards to the singularity at the centre would subsequently cause tidal effects to mount very rapidly to infinity, totally destroying the observer in less than a minute! Destruction by rapidly mounting tidal forces is, indeed, what awaits any physical material as it plunges inwards towards the centre of a black hole. Recall our concern about the fate of the material of our 10M⊙ collapsing star. Even the individual particles of which it is composed will, in short order, encounter tidal forces so strong that they will be torn apart — to what, no-one knows!

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the curvature of spacetime at the event horizon of a black hole is actually the curvature of the shortest trajectory through spacetime, the geodesic, at the event horizon of a black hole.

The dragging of an observer (material) inwards towards the singularity at the centre of a black hole is due to the shortest trajectory being in that direction, since space intervals are relatively contracted in that direction. But since time intervals are relatively expanded in that direction, the time it takes for material to fall to the centre of a black hole approaches infinity, relative to the time intervals outside the black hole. That is, even if events inside a black hole could be observed from outside the black hole, they would appear to take forever.

Since space intervals contract with proximity to the singularity, material falling into a black hole has less and less space to occupy. But since the spacetime of black holes is due to the effects of mass, and matter can be neither created nor destroyed, a reasonable assumption is that individual particles will eventually be converted to energy at some point before the space intervals contract (theoretically) to zero at the singularity.