When objects fall into a black hole, observers outside the black hole will never see the object cross the event horizon because the object's time slows down and will stop at the event horizon. The object also become red shifted until it is no longer visible. I read that that from the perspective of the object falling in that time goes on as normal and it falls through and no special place like the event horizon is apparent, eventually it reaches the singularity in infinite time.
This all makes sense when talking about a classic black hole where the black hole will last forever. As long as we don't see the object any more, what ever happens to it happens to it. Information is not lost but just stored in a black hole forever.
However, when talking about black holes with Hawking radiation. The black hole will evaporate before the object reaches the event horizon. If anything actually falls beyond the event horizon, there comes out the black hole information paradox. The paradox is remedied by saying all information that falls into a black hole gets represented at the surface of the event horizon and the hawking radiation interacts with the hologram to retain information so it is actually never lost, the holographic principle. This means everything that ever fell in would be represented at the surface and just frozen there.
Obviously a person falling in will get rearranged and die but it seems to me that a quantum observer who falls in the black hole will just come out as hawking radiation. This just means that a black hole is not a singularity and simply a quantum object that distorts spacetime a lot at the event horizon. It also means it's not even really black, it's just very dark grey. And that the event horizon isn't real. A black hole in this sense is just a very elaborate mirror. It makes sense to me that the object falling in will bounce off the "event horizon" and become time reversed and then come out. This assumption seems classically consistent but might not be what actually happens. It is just easy to imaging time slowing down to 0 and then moving negative from the outside perspective.
That brings me to my questions: Why do people say there is an inside to a black hole? What does the inside even mean when nothing from our universe actually gets there? If the hologram at the event horizon is all that is required to describe everything that ever went in, why does a singularity even have to exist? Is it sufficient to say a black hole is just a shell of spacetime where these effects happen and the event horizon is just a limited edge in our universe? And if true event horizons don't actually exist, and black holes don't really exist, why do people keep saying they do? Are pure singularity with a true event horizon thought to exist but not give off hawking radiation, how do physicist get around the problem of having hawking radiation and pure singularities? Isn't the singularity inside the black hole from the perspective of the object going in the same as the event horizon from the perspective of something outside as it is where from both perspectives the object will be at time infinity? Why do we even bother describing an object falling beyond an event horizon when nothing about that object beyond the event horizon can come back to our universe, which means it is untestable and physics requires testability. There must be a paradox there because for something to fall in and be described by physics, we must learn of what actually happens and we can't do that without breaking the event horizon anyways as no information can travel out.
I have read the answers to this, this, this, this, this and many other Phys.SE questions in regards to black holes. As you can probably tell from the question, I am not a physicist so my understanding of this is limited and I have not formal studied anything to do with general relativity and the schwarzschild metric used to model a black hole with actual math. My understanding is limited to the parts without math and things that can be described in normal words.
Although there is a lot of questions here, since all of this is very much related, the questions are all very much dependent on each other, I don't know how I would separate them into different questions without continuously referring back to this. Also questions regarding do black holes actually exist seems to all be closed as duplicate but no-one seems to give real answers.
Best Answer
I appreciate your curiosity, but you are asking a question that needs math to even attempt an answer. That does not mean that an answer based on math is correct, but the more experiments we perform, such as the recent LIGO test on gravitational waves, the more confidence we have that the math and physics behind General Relativity has again not been falsified, which is the way physics works.
This is an example of what I mean when I say that only math gives us a guide to black holes. You make a statement that cannot be proven, but look at the examples we have of near black hole type objects, such as neutron stars. Our problem is that we need to explain where this extra mass that may have otherwise formed a "normal" matter object, instead forms a black hole, so where does matter go "to", at infinite density?
Nobody knows for sure what happens infalling matter once it passes the event horizon, but we sure can't say that it stops at the edge, otherwise black holes would not grow larger, and our observations indicate that they do accrue matter over time.