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by SonicScrub 918 days ago
When referring to black holes, "falling in" means going past the event horizon. For all practical purposes for us on the outside of the singularity, this is "having fallen into the black hole" as any object is gone to us forever once having done so. We don't use falling in to mean touching the singularity, which as you noted, does indeed take infinite time. Using the definition this way isn't particularly useful.
2 comments

I don't think that's right.

This is my understanding: It takes an infinite time to cross the event horizon from the perspective of a distant, stationary observer, but a finite time from the perspective of the object that is actually falling towards the black hole. Once past the event horizon, reaching the singularity takes a finite amount of time from the perspective of the falling object. From the point of view of a distant external observer, time from event horizon to singularity is a meaningless question because the events inside the event horizon are causaully disconnected from the events outside of the event horizon.

Guys uh, I don't think we have a lot of empirical evidence from people who've gone near black holes and returned.
Your explanation is wrong. For an outside observer, time dilation approaches infinity at the event horizon. Singularities don't even exist for an outside observer, they have yet to happen in the infinite future.