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.
First, note that there are no sources of gravity or of electromagnetism inside a black hole. Contrary to popular belief, black holes, like wormholes, have no center. In fact, there is no way to tell them apart from outside.
Second, electric field lines are lines in space, not spacetime, so they are not sensitive to horizons or other causal structures.
This is wrong as stated, it only works in the opposite direction. It takes progressively longer to receive a photon emitted at regular intervals from someone approaching a black hole. Again, this has nothing to do with an already present static electric field.
For your second sentence, I sort of get that; there’s no point one can travel to that satisfies any “center” property; the various symmetries would have a center on finitely-curved spacetime, but for a black hole that area gets stretched enough that you can only define the “center” as a... (read more)