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Message: <blockquote data-quote="freyar" data-source="post: 6086237" data-attributes="member: 40227">You have to be careful about how you think about time (especially concepts like past, present, and future) in situations like this.  The anchor (closer to the horizon) is not really "stuck in the past."  Let's suppose our spaceship, the anchor, and your astronaut all carry incredibly precise atomic clocks which are all synchronized when they're all sitting together in that stable orbit.  Now we lower the anchor.  If you're watching from the spaceship, you see that the anchor's clock slows down compared to our clock, so that time seems to be passing very slowly at the anchor.  However, if I'm on the anchor, I feel time passing normally but notice that the spaceship's clock appears to be running very fast.  It's very important that neither is the "right" time; both of us are correct for our own time.  If the astronaut starts out hanging out with you, then travels down the tether to visit me, then climbs back up, the astronaut's clock (wristwatch?) will not agree with either your clock or mine, but it will correctly register how much time has elapsed for the astronaut.  Note that everyone is always moving forward in time.  You never see my clock or the astronaut's watch stop completely.  We just move forward in time at different rates.This is sort of the million dollar question, and I now have to answer you very carefully.  Let's start with Einstein's general relativity, which is where we really _know_ the answer.  In GR (classical physics), there is no such thing as Hawking radiation, and we just see light from the infalling object get more and more redshifted.  From our point of view far away, that's all that happens: the object falls toward the black hole and gradually goes dark as light from it redshifts --- we also see its clock slow down, and we never see it actually enter the black hole.  From the infalling object's point of view, time just passes normally, and it never actually notices entering the black hole.  OK, now let's imagine some sort of quantum gravity.  Hawking has famously given a strong argument that black holes should radiate like they are objects at a fixed temperature.  The redshifting light from the object dropping in will, in fact, get dimmer than the Hawking radiation, but it can't be the Hawking radiation because it generally won't look like it has that fixed temperature.  A big puzzle in quantum gravity is how what goes into a black hole turns into Hawking radiation.  Some people claim that, if you collapse stuff to make a black hole, you don't actually end up with Hawking radiation, essentially saying that Hawking radiation is an artifact of imagining an eternal black hole.  The puzzle is even stranger when you consider that someone falling into the black hole doesn't (classically) notice that they've fallen inside.  They shouldn't see themselves turn in to Hawking radiation!  Rather recently, another group of researchers claims that quantum mechanically, people falling into a black hole should actually burn up outside.  They're probably wrong, but it's quite provocative.Anyway, there is more to say, but it's past my bedtime...</blockquote>

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