[dr_lew]

It’s a long story.

Well, I gave mine to my dad once, ‘cuz he was interested in it, and I bought another one. Then it came back to me.

I do like the idea of having two of them, though, weighty tome that it is.

[dr_lew]

Well, since I have two copies, I went ahead and looked up "tidal forces" and found Section 32.6, THE FATE OF A MAN WHO FALLS INTO THE SINGULARITY AT r=0 . I was pleased and possibly a little bit surprised that my remarks were entirely consonant with this more extensive treatment.

For one thing, I was actually surprised that the classical expression for tidal forces in a 1/r² field is exactly the same as the expression they derive from the Schwarzschild metric. They do an integration over a rectangular solid as a model of a human body, whereas I just took 1g/cm to be "huge". They do remark,

Consequently an astrophysicist on a freely collapsing star of one solar mass will be killed by tidal forces when the star's radius is R ~ 200km >> 2M ~ 3 km.

... which is the point I was making, except I used an earth mass, in which case the disparity is much more extreme.