then how do we on the outside know accurately
how much mass fell in??.... what you are saying does not explain how the black holes mass is kept... if all information was lost as you say then we could not measure how much had fallen in..which we can so even tho we are told everything you have been saying i stand by the fact that information about the mass must be retained in the singularity.... or a black holes mass would not relate to what the hole has inside it...

dcl: Once a mass ihas fallen past the event horizon of a black hole, it falls all the way into the singularity, where it is compressed into a dimensionless point. Any information that it may have contained is destroyed by that final process.

if this was the case you would not be able to measure the mass that has fallen in as that information would have been lost...which it is not is it?

?

ie if you throw ten million tons into a black hole you can after measure the fact its mass has increased by ten million tons...

is that not information?

Information theory is not one of my strong points, hut it's my understanding that mere AMOUNT of mass does not constitute "information" in the informationi theory sense, especially when that mass is indistinguishable from other any other mass that may constitute part of the contents of the single dimensionless point at the center of a black hole.

i guess you could not store any bits in it but it is interesting that there must be some accounting system in there so it knows how massive it is...

It seems to me, that there might still be some sort of on-going debate about this relativistic mass thingy among the real physicists. I'm not a real physicist, but you certainly seem to be, so I'm very likely just to take it easy and just believe whatever you're saying...

But moving too fast just won't turn you into a black hole, in any frame of reference ('cause if it did happen in one, it'd had to happen in all the others, too, right?), that was the key point I was making, I guess...

I don't think debunking Einstein was the point in those links at all, more like on the contrary, I would say. I don't remember exactly what it used to say there, when I first linked the page, but currently it seems to be much more "pro-relativistic mass" than it was back then, in January of this year, I guess. Here's the same link again, though the contents of the page have now changed a bit:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...y/SR/mass.html

Says there, that the concept of relativistic mass is still very "useful". OK by me then, I guess; let those who calculate these things for work, on a daily basis, use it if they want to...

Don't believe everything even physicists say either. Even physicists, as godlike as they are, are known to make mistakes. The great Newton said light consisted of particles, not waves. Then it was found that they're waves. Then to really confuse the issue, it was found that they're particles on even days and waves on odd days (huh?). He said gravitational forces hold planets in orbit. Then Einstein said, "Not so. It's warping of space". There are many other examples throughout the history of science. Maybe 100 years from now we'll marvel at how naive Einstein's theories were.