The lunatics that run the relativity asylum cannot deny that, in the
eigenzeit of any relatively-stationary observer outside an imploding
star, the star's material *never* actually forms an event horizon, let
alone retreating within it. Yet they still try to eat their cake and
have it ...


"If you attempt to witness the black hole's formation, you'll see the
star collapse more and more slowly, never precisely reaching the
Schwarzchild radius.

"Now, this led early on to an image of a black hole [sic] as a strange
sort of suspended-animation object, a "frozen star" ... This, however,
is not what you'd see [because] as things get closer to the
["incipient"] event horizon, they also get *dimmer* ... and if one
considers that light is made up of discrete photons, the time of
escape of *the last photon* is actually finite, and not very large.
[An argument not relevant in principle, and in any case obviated by
imagining emitted EM radiation of arbitrarily-high frequency.] So
things would wink out as they got close, including the dying star, and
the name "black hole" is justified."

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...s/fall_in.html
(Physics/Relativity FAQ, "What happens to you if you fall into a black
hole?")


Science writer Paul Davies makes similar comments in his "Simplicio-
Sagacio dialogues" ("About Time", Penguin 1995, pp.119-20):-

"[Q:] But black holes are still a fiction as far as we in the universe
outside are concerned. The star that implodes to supposedly create
the black hole would also take an infinite amount of our time to
retreat inside its Schwarzchild radius. The black, supposedly empty
region would actually be occupied by the remnants of the star,
wouldn't it?

"[A:] In a sense that is correct. In fact, the Russians originally
disliked the term "black hole" for that very reason. ... Officially
they used the term "frozen stars," acknowledging that from a distance
time and motion are frozen at the Schwarzchild radius. ... But all
the properties of this collapsing star become very rapidly (typically
in milliseconds or less from the onset of collapse) indistinguishable
from a genuinely empty, already-formed black hole. ..."


Which - considering Prof. Davies's preceding discussion of black-hole
singularities, and possible gateways to other universes - is as big a
bullstatement as we are likely to encounter this side of transeternity.