"The energy does not leave the black hole and the battery depletes." Where does the energy go then? What absorbs it? it's facing outwards.
OMG WE HAVE AN ENERGY LEAK. Now everybody gets to guess what happens at inifinity. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Me neither. Perhaps it is already connected in some way prior to releasing energy. Could that be possible? Spooky action at a distance and all that.
But this is as pointless an argument as that of Bishop Berkeley. If the photon behaves as if it exists whenever it is measured, then to speculate as to whether it may cease to do so in between is utterly moot. To put it another way, if, to borrow a legal phrase, it exists at all material times, then that's what we mean when say it exists. This can be seen as the Occam's Razor principle, yet again. Since all observations can be explained by postulating continuity of its existence, addition of a further postulate, that perhaps it ceases to exist when not observed, adds nothing. It is against science to add unnecessary postulates.
"But this is as pointless an argument as that of Bishop Berkeley." ...and almost as pointless as the Universe.
"The energy does not leave the black hole and the battery depletes." Where does the energy go then? What absorbs it? it's facing outwards.
So? The whole point about a black hole is that light can't get out, even if it is pointing directly outwards.
But I want to know where the light goes to. Where does it get absorbed once it's left the flashlight in order to satisfy conservation? It can't escape the black hole and it doesn't get bent along a parabolic path or anything like that because it is perpendicular to the centre. So if the battery depletes, where does the light energy end up?
It starts out pointed away from the center, but the extreme gravity warps the geodesic the light follows, and it just goes round and round. It doesn't have to get absorbed by anything to conserve energy, it just keeps traveling round and round.
Kind of like this thread. And all the while the local path is a straight line. There have been sci fi dramatizations of this in which a person exits Door #2 of a room to find he just entered Door #1 of the same room.