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People tend to talk of a “paradox” with this situation, wherein you don’t notice anything unusual as you cross the event horizon, but the distant observer claims that it takes you forever to cross the event horizon.

It stems from an error in Gravitation by Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and John Wheeler. On page 848 you can see figure 32.1, which shows free-fall Schwarzschild coordinates on the left:

Image by W H Freeman and company, publishers of Gravitation

The horizontal axis denotes distance, and the vertical axis denotes time. The vertical dashed line is at r = 2M and denotes the event horizon. The curve on the right denotes the path of an infalling body outside the event horizon. It gets closer and closer to the event horizon as the time t increases. Note though that the time axis is truncated, obscuring the way the infalling body somehow manages to cross the event horizon at time t = infinity. Then it comes back down the chart, tracing out the curve to the left of the vertical dashed line. It ends up in the central point singularity at r = 0 at proper time tau τ = 35.1 M.

So, according to MTW, the infalling body goes to the end of time and back! It’s wrong. In fact, it’s doubly wrong, because the falling body never even reaches the event horizon. Einstein came up with special relativity in 1905 with his two postulates, one of which was “the speed of light is constant”. But only two years later in 1907 he was saying light curves in a gravitational field because the speed of light isn’t constant. He said it again in 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, and 1916. You don’t find Einstein saying light curves because spacetime is curved. Instead you find him saying: “As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.

The bottom line is that you fall down in space where there’s a vertical gradient in the speed of light. You fall down faster and faster, falling through space where the speed of light is getting slower and slower. This can’t continue indefinitely, because you would end up falling faster than the local speed of light. So something else happens.

As for what, see the famous 2013 AMPS paper an apologia for firewalls. Tucked away in the conclusion is footnote 31, containing a reference 87 to Friedwardt Winterberg’s 2001 paper Gamma-Ray Bursters and Lorentzian Relativity. Winterberg said this: “if the balance of forces holding together elementary particles is destroyed near the event horizon, all matter would be converted into zero rest mass particles which could explain the large energy release of gamma ray bursters”. See the Wikipedia gamma ray burst article and note that “a typical burst releases as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime”. I am confident that Winterberg is right. You don’t make it to the event horizon. Instead you disintegrate into a gamma ray burst. Some of the gamma photons escape into space, whilst others are swallowed by the black hole. And that’s that. There is no paradox.

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