Falling in to a black hole

Professor Susskind continues the in-depth discussion of the physics of black holes. He begins with the Schwarzschild metric and then applies coordinate transformations to demonstrate that spacetime is nearly flat in the vicinity of the event horizon of a large black hole. In other words, nothing special happens at the event horizon for an observer falling towards the black hole.

Professor Susskind then uses spacetime diagrams with hyperbolic coordinates to describe the physics of falling through the event horizon and into the black hole. The students' have many questions about the unusual properties of black holes.