I've heard Kip Thorne repeatedly state that matter is destroyed when a black hole is created, that all you are left with is distorted spacetime.
"The idea that black holes are made from very compacted matter is wrong; it's simply wrong. It may have been created from very compacted matter, but the matter is gone. It has been completely destroyed. It no longer exists." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSr95NgdAPg&t=8m34s
"When a black hole is born, the energy gets transformed from the energy of the matter to the energy of warped spacetime, so it's a transformation fo the form of the energy from the one to the other, but the energy is still conserved." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSr95NgdAPg&t=9m43s
I understand this theory, as far as it goes: it's similar to how you need a starter coil on a tesla motor, but once the field is set up, it is self-perpetuating. I also understand how it could conserve rotational momentum, but there my understanding stops, and the confusion starts.
What about other conserved quantities, like electric charge and (maybe) baryon and fermion numbers? Wouldn't this understanding require some kind of theory unification, such that all matter is just a warp in spacetime, in which case it renders the observation tautological and uninteresting?
This confusion makes me think that I'm missing something about what he's saying. Alternatively, it could just be that, since what happens beyond the event horizon is unknowable in a scientific (as opposed to philosophical) sense, this is all scientifically unmoored and is in the realm of interpretation rather than reality.
Thanks!
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