Staff Emeritus

Science Advisor

Homework Helper

My $.02. Intuition is great, but - it's just not reliable. The only way to know if your intuition is correct or not is to look at the facts. Using your intution to try and guess at the facts is just not going to be reliable.

We don't actually have a lot of facts relevant to your questions about black holes, though we do have some measurements of accretion disks, things orbiting near black holes. That said, we don't have any measurements from things crossing the event horizon, and if GR is correct, we never will, because we'll never get a signal back from anything beyond the event horizon. So in some sense, even the best available information we have is a bit speculative, because we're unable to make measurements to confirm it.

That said, we do have some theoretical models of how we think black holes should work. One caveat here - the usual discussion of "black holes" is a discussion about a simplified theoretical model of a black hole called the Schwarzschild black hole that is pretty much known to be unlikely to be correct in the interior region, due to known mathematical issues regarind the stability of the solution. We can't tell for sure, because we can't make any measurements there :(. We can say that our theroies do match the measurments we are able to make, though, said measurments being made of the exterior region, so the model is good to use for those purposes, but really not so good to talk about what happens inside.

The best way to gain enough understanding so that one's intuiton has at least a chance of being right is to dive into the math and study textbooks, but that may not be feasible without the correct background, and getting the correct background is not a trivial task at all. And even with the correct background, there is a significant amount of work to be done, though I'd say the work needed to get the background is the greatest part for serious study.

Without the background AND the time to study actual textooks, one will be stuck with reading popularizations. There are still various levels there. For black holes, my favorite popularization would be any of Kip Thorne's books, the most relevant of which would be "Black holes and timewarps: Einstein's outrageous legacy". As a textbook author himself, Thorne's popularizations are (n my opinion) a cut above the rest. The introductory chapter does have a journey into a black hole, which may be of interest. My favorite textbook, which has a chatty and informal style (but also the math) is by Misner, Thorne (the same one as the populraization) and Wheeler, and is called "Gravitation". Some parts of the textbook might be understandable even without the math, but that's iffy, it's easy to get wrong ideas even from a good textbook source like "Gravitation" if one doesn't have the actual math background needed to follow all the details.

Thorne's book "interstellar" might also be interesting reading.