Hi Fraser! I would like to thank you and Dr. Pamela very much for the great show on “Black Holes Big and Small”. I got to learn a whole lot of new stuff from the show.

Dr. Pamela said that the rate at which materials fall into the black hole is choked by the law of conservation of angular momentum. Materials cannot fall directly straight in until they have a perfectly magical trajectory which never happens to be in the real universe.

Why do not the materials fall straight into the black hole?
Why do they have to go round the massive object before falling into it instead of going straight into it?
How does the law of the conservation of angular momentum apply?

Please explain the physics behind this.