Does Time only stop at the event horizon of a black hole?

Question

If so can one then watch the universe's entire history pass before one's eyes?

Answer 1

First you'll probably be spaghettified on your way into the Black Hole.

Second, time stops for you so you will not be seeing much of anything assuming you could still see.

Answer 2

1) only at the event horizon?  don't know.

2) see the entire history? No, since you would not see whatever information got there before you.  The future history would arrive to you at an alarming rate.  

You would not be aware that your time flow is slowing down.  For you, it is the time flow of the outside world that is lots faster.  The information about the life history of the universe would arrive your way a bit too fast:  everything blue shifted so much into the UV, x-rays and gamma rays, you would be fried.

That is, of course, if you had survived spaghettification (look it up) from the Black hole's tidal effects.

Answer 3

Don't worry about the spaghettification -- that will not happen until you are deep inside the event horizon.  For a 30,000 solar mass BH, the tidal force at the event horizon is only 1 G.

As for time stopping -- no, that does not happen.   You will not see the "entire history" of the universe.  What you will see is a flash of light.  A lot of the light that falls into a BH, orbits outside the event horizon for a minutes before it falls in.  As you pass this band of light, you will see a bright flash.

After you pass the event horizon, you will have 1/10 of a second to admire the view, before you get the singularity.

Answer 4

Thanks for an interesting question:  I believe the answer is no, you cannot watch the history of the universe pass before your eyes, because the light from distant events cannot arrive at your point of observation instantaneously.  

Even if time is, for all intents and purposes,  so distorted that it has "stopped" when you cross the event horizon, it is still "ticking away" in the universe and all manner of events are still happening there.  Events happening relatively close to your location would indeed flash by in the blink of an eye, since time for you is so slowed down... but information (ie, light, Xrays, CMB radiation, gamma rays) arriving from events happening farthest away from you in spacetime is still subject to the speed limit "c" (the speed of light), so it will never arrive at the instant, let alone before the event happened locally.

There is one exception: and that is if your black hole is either charged and/or spinning.  In that case local spacetime can become so distorted that a wormhole to the future forms locally, and then, you might indeed have a chance to witness the whole future of the universe right to its "omega"... before your inevitable Ω as you are drawn out into the singularity beyond the event horizon... where space and time lose all their relevance.

Answer 5

No, time would also slow down the closer one gets to moving at the speed of light and time would essentially "stop" if we ever actually reached that speed.  Since time isn't "moving" there would be nothing to watch, everything would be standing still...theoretically, of course.

Answer 6

This is where Einstein's relativity comes in. If you were being drawn deeper and deeper into a black hole and had a clock with you, time would move along at exactly the same rate as it always has. However, for someone watching you falling into the black hole - and if they could see your clock - the rate of time would become slower and slower as you fell farther into the black hole.