harrylin said:
I take it that you mean, as implied by the topic of this thread, from the point of view of the distant observer.
No, I meant "in reality". You can't change reality by changing point of view. So since it seems like all this talk about different points of view is only increasing the confusion, I'm no longer talking about that. I'm talking about invariant properties of reality. It is an invariant property of the reality predicted by the Schwarzschild solution of the Einstein Field Equation that objects do reach and fall through the horizon.
harrylin said:
So, once more: doing what you do is making a metaphysical claim that pertains to what we cannot measure - it is your physical interpretation.
No, it's a physical *prediction* made by GR, and more specifically by the Schwarzschild solution of the EFE. (By which I mean not "the solution Schwarzschild published" or "what Schwarzschild believed", or "what Einstein believed about what Schwarzschild wrote", but the best modern understanding of the solution of the EFE for a spherically symmetric vacuum spacetime.) If you're going to contest that prediction, you will be claiming that the prediction doesn't match actual reality; it's not a matter of "interpretation".
How might the prediction not match reality? I can see a couple of possible ways:
(1) The EFE is wrong; or at least, it's wrong sometimes (for example, it's wrong if it predicts an event horizon). This doesn't strike me as a promising approach, and as far as I know nobody has tried to argue for it.
(2) The Schwarzschild solution isn't applicable to actual collapsed objects, because when you get close enough to forming a horizon, either the collapse stops, or the stress-energy tensor changes, in such a way that the horizon never actually forms. In other words, no real spacetime is ever vacuum down to the horizon radius; it always ends up becoming non-vacuum at some larger radius than this. This could be because:
(2a) Some classical effect intervenes: for example, there is always enough pressure present, or enough mass gets radiated away, etc., so that a horizon never actually forms; instead the collapse stops at some other stable state. This doesn't seem promising either: all the stable states of matter that we know of other than black holes have maximum mass limits, and we know of black hole candidates whose observed masses are many orders of magnitude larger than those limits.
(2b) Some quantum effect intervenes: for example, in some thread or other we have discussed possible quantum effects that could change the stress-energy tensor close enough to a horizon, so that a horizon was prevented from forming. This hasn't been ruled out, but does not appear to be promising.
Now: where in any of the above did I talk about coordinates or "interpretations"? Nowhere. I just talked about physical predictions and what sorts of physical phenomena might affect how accurate they are.
(Note: I was only talking about the horizon above, not the singularity at r = 0; that's a different can of worms. I also wasn't talking about Hawking radiation, because whether a horizon eventually evaporates away is a different question from whether it forms in the first place. If a horizon forms, then there will be some possibility of objects falling through it.)
harrylin said:
Others claim that GR does not make such claims except for the predictions of events.
The statement that objects fall below the horizon *is* a "prediction of events".
harrylin said:
And if an event at (x,y,z,t) has taken place according to us, is a matter of convention.
See my comments to DaleSpam on the use of the word "convention".