Gene Osten
05-26-2002, 05:23 AM
You said it - timeless.
Your question actually has different answers depending on who is looking at the watch - it is space-time we are talking about.
If you are riding along with the watch, everything appears normal as you approach the event horizon, since your internal clock also slows down at the same rate. However, any physical object will be torn apart by tidal forces, so a real watch (whether mechanical OR quartz :-) will stop. So will the observer. Inside the event horizon, the black hole is an infinitessimal point with infinite density and no one has developed any equations, but the assumption is that there is no such thing as "time".
If you are "watching" from a distance (in a galaxy far, far away), the watch will appear to slow down infinitely close to stopping as the gravitational field of the black hole increases in intensity as the watch approaches it, but it never gets to the event horizon.
This is a short answer to a deep question. If you would like to pursue it further, try Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" for light reading. For more depth (but still no math), probably the best book ever written on the subject is "About Time by Paul Davies.
Hope this helps,
Gene
Your question actually has different answers depending on who is looking at the watch - it is space-time we are talking about.
If you are riding along with the watch, everything appears normal as you approach the event horizon, since your internal clock also slows down at the same rate. However, any physical object will be torn apart by tidal forces, so a real watch (whether mechanical OR quartz :-) will stop. So will the observer. Inside the event horizon, the black hole is an infinitessimal point with infinite density and no one has developed any equations, but the assumption is that there is no such thing as "time".
If you are "watching" from a distance (in a galaxy far, far away), the watch will appear to slow down infinitely close to stopping as the gravitational field of the black hole increases in intensity as the watch approaches it, but it never gets to the event horizon.
This is a short answer to a deep question. If you would like to pursue it further, try Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" for light reading. For more depth (but still no math), probably the best book ever written on the subject is "About Time by Paul Davies.
Hope this helps,
Gene