Re: Since a black hole is spherical in shape, does matter get pulled...

Hi Josh - and thank you for the compliment!

The answer to your question is "yes and no", depending on what kind of black hole you're talking about.

A non-rotating, or Schwarzschild black hole (named after the person who first worked out this solution to Einstein's general relativity equations), has a spherical event horizon. So if you and I started out at equal distances from the singularity, on opposite sides, we would indeed get 'spaghettified' (good word!) and meet in the middle. The actual path taken to get to the singularity (a straight line or spiral inwards) would depend on whether we had any inital velocity with respect to the black hole.

Lots of people get the idea that there's only one way to fall into a black hole, from the "top". This comes from looking at pictures like this one, which show a black hole as a kind of dent in a "rubber sheet" surface. But you have to remember than the rubber sheet idea is a two-dimensional analogy for our three-dimensional space, so you can fall into a black hole from any direction.

So far, so good. But there is another kind of black hole which doesn't have a spherical event horizon. This is the Kerr, or rotating, black hole. Here is what its event horizon looks like - it's bulged out along the equator. (The planet Saturn rotates quite rapidly, and actually has this shape as well - but it's not a black hole!) So if you and I were falling into a Kerr black hole, the rate at which we got torn apart would depend on whether we were heading along the axis of rotation of along the equator. Similar things would happen to each of us if we started exactly opposite one another, though.

People get excited about Kerr black holes because their singularities have interesting properties - the singularity is a ring instead of a point. This leads to all sorts of wild things like the concept of negative mass, and maybe even time travel or travel to parallel universes. This is all highly speculative, though, and is likely to stay that way --- travelling inside a black hole event horizon means you can't come back out and tell people what you find.

The pictures for this answer were taken from a neat webpage (another copy of it is here). which has lots of information on black holes and a good list of references. You have to be a bit careful about information on black holes that you find on the Internet -- some of it is nonsense written by people who like the idea of black holes but don't know the necessary mathematics. But the site I just mentioned (as well as our own MAD Scientist Network), and many others, are reliable sources of further information.

Pauline