This Reddit post says things like:
And then the point goes out. All at once, as if God turned off the switch. You have crossed the event horizon of the black hole.
and:
But Alice cannot see Bob either, because in order to do so, she has to turn her head toward her own past. The distortion of spacetime is so great that the spatial direction in which Bob lies relative to her is actually in her past. In technical terms, any light that comes to her from Bob will fall perpendicular to her eyeballs, regardless of which direction she turns her head.
When I read this, I believed that it was wrong (but well-written, making it more dangerous!). (However, he described Gravity Probe B's verification of the geodetic effect correctly.)
Wikipedia says:
An observer crossing a black hole event horizon can calculate the moment they've crossed it, but will not actually see or feel anything special happen at that moment. In terms of visual appearance, observers who fall into the hole perceive the black region constituting the horizon as lying at some apparent distance below them, and never experience crossing this visual horizon.[7] Other objects that had entered the horizon along the same radial path but at an earlier time would appear below the observer but still above the visual position of the horizon, and if they had fallen in recently enough the observer could exchange messages with them before either one was destroyed by the gravitational singularity.[8] Increasing tidal forces (and eventual impact with the hole's singularity) are the only locally noticeable effects.
And it cites http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/schw.html which says:
Engulfed in blackness? NO! It is a common misconception that if you fall inside the horizon of a black hole you will be engulfed in blackness. More specifically, the story is that as you fall towards the horizon, the image of the sky above concentrates into a smaller and smaller circular patch, which disappears altogether as you pass through the horizon. The misconception arises because if you lower yourself very slowly towards the horizon, firing your rockets like crazy just to stay put, then indeed your view of the outside universe will be concentrated into a small, bright circle above you. Click on the button to see what it looks like if you lower yourself slowly to the horizon. Physically, this happens because you are swimming like crazy through the inrushing flow of space (see Waterfall), and relativistic beaming concentrates and brightens the scene ahead of (above) you. See 4D Perspective for a tutorial on relativistic beaming. But this is a thoroughly unrealistic situation. You'd be daft to waste your rockets hovering just above the horizon of a black hole. If you had all that rocket power, why not do something useful with it, like take a trip across the Universe? If you nevertheless insist on hovering just above the horizon, and if by mistake you drop just slightly inside the horizon, then you can no longer stay at rest, however hard you fire your rockets: the faster-than-light flow of space into the black hole will pull you in. Whatever you choose to do, the view of the outside Universe will not disappear as you pass through the horizon.
This explanation agrees with everything I know (when hovering outside the event horizon, you are accelerating instead of being in free fall).
Can you confirm that the Reddit post was incorrect, and Wikipedia and its cited link are correct?
The last two quotes are indeed correct, and the reddit one is a mix of true and false statements.
To begin with, the conclusion subtly replaces the original premise of arbitrarily high velocity with arbitrarily high acceleration. (Confusing velocity and acceleration is a Grade 10 science error.) Given that one cannot accelerate to or past the speed of light, near-infinite acceleration engine is indeed of no use inside a black hole. However, arbitrarily high velocity is a different matter. It lets you escape from inside a black hole horizon. Of course, going...
In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.