John Colton's blog

Cecil Adams, of course, is the nearly omniscient author of the Straight Dope newspaper column. The Straight Dope is almost always worth reading.

An older column about "What would happen if you were swallowed by a black hole" popped up a week or two ago under the "classic columns" section of the website. However, it said that you would fall into the black hole forever. That's wrong, according to a discussion I had in ~1993 with a black hole expert. So, I emailed Cecil about it and told him that while it would appear to an outside observer that you would take forever to reach the hole, to you yourself it would happen very quickly. That's relativity for you.

I've (practically?) never seen this before, but in his column from last week Cecil admits an error:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2909/what-would-happen-if-you-were-swallowed-by-a-black-hole-revisited

Don't worry about falling forever toward the black hole without ever actually getting there. I said that was one of the possibilities. I acknowledge with shame that I was wrong. The truth, insofar as this can be known about an event that's fundamentally unknowable, is that it might appear to an outside observer that you were falling indefinitely, for reasons I don't feel it's necessary to explore. However, you yourself would rocket through right on schedule, or at least we think you would.

He doesn't acknowledge my email, and there may well have been others who wrote in, but I'm taking credit! :-)