> Fundamentally, external observers and infalling observers can't disagree on "what happens", just the timing of events. If external observers never see someone falling in, then they didn't fall in.
This isn't true. As long as the two observers can't communicate with each other, they absolutely can have different results. To put it in simpler terms, the requirement of physics is that an experiment has a unique result according to some rule, but different experiments can have different results even if they break our intuitions.
So, if you measure the position of a particle falling towards a blackhole, you will see it disappear at the event horizon, and perhaps be radiated out later as Hawking radiation from that same event horizon. If you measure the position of the same particle while you yourself are passing through the event horizon, you will it will record no special interaction and see the particle moving completely normally. Since you can't perform both experiments at once, and you can't relay any data from one to the other, there is no contradiction.
This is just another case of a duality in physics, similar to how some experiments measure electrons as point-like particles completely localized to a certain place, and others measure them as waves spread out over a very large area.
If that were true, then black holes would appear as extremely bright balls of red-shifted radiation, as all particles whose trajectory ever moved towards the center of the black hole would still be visible. This is obviously not true, black holes appear as completely black objects that might have an extremely bright ring or halo of matter orbiting.
This isn't true. As long as the two observers can't communicate with each other, they absolutely can have different results. To put it in simpler terms, the requirement of physics is that an experiment has a unique result according to some rule, but different experiments can have different results even if they break our intuitions.
So, if you measure the position of a particle falling towards a blackhole, you will see it disappear at the event horizon, and perhaps be radiated out later as Hawking radiation from that same event horizon. If you measure the position of the same particle while you yourself are passing through the event horizon, you will it will record no special interaction and see the particle moving completely normally. Since you can't perform both experiments at once, and you can't relay any data from one to the other, there is no contradiction.
This is just another case of a duality in physics, similar to how some experiments measure electrons as point-like particles completely localized to a certain place, and others measure them as waves spread out over a very large area.