If time stops at the event horizon of a black hole, how does anything ever fall into it?
Time doesn’t actually stop, as such. If I watched you falling into a black hole I would be able to observe that, relative to mine, your time was slowing down. As you reached the event horizon – the point of no return, even for light – I would see your image frozen. This does not mean that you are actually still there, frozen in time. You would have fallen into the black hole (being stretched like a piece of spaghetti as your feet would become massively heavier than your head) and your mass would contribute to the mass of the singularity. But the image of you would remain forever as the light (which is how we see anything) has been unable to escape. Therefore – all things being relative, of course – my perception of what’s happened to you and your perception are totally different.
