My friend Penelope is sitting still at a safe distance, watching me fall into the black hole. What does she see?
Penelope sees things quite differently from you. As you get closer and closer to the horizon, she sees you move more and more slowly. In fact, no matter how long she waits, she will never quite see you reach the horizon. In fact, more or less the same thing can be said about the material that formed the black hole in the first place. Suppose that the black hole formed from a collapsing star. As the material that is to form the black hole collapses, Penelope sees it get smaller and smaller, approaching but never quite reaching its Schwarzschild radius. This is why black holes were originally called frozen stars: because they seem to ‘freeze’ at a size just slightly bigger than the Schwarzschild radius. Why does she see things this way? The best way to think about it is that it’s really just an optical illusion. It doesn’t really take an infinite amount of time for the black hole to form, and it doesn’t really take an infinite amount of time for you to cross the horizon. (If you don’t be
