STRENGTH OF THE MASS INFLATION SINGULARITY

Whether the "mass inflation" singularity believed to lie inside a realistic charged black hole is strong enough to completely destroy any infalling matter is addressed. Despite the fact that the physical deformation of an infalling object remains finite at the singularity, we argue that the infalling matter is completely destroyed as the energy absorbed by the object diverges as the Cauchy horizon singularity is approached. Thus, in the phase space of the infalling object, the object's configuration in the length dimensions remains finite, but the momentum dimensions become unbounded. The entropy of an infalling object, being proportional to the logarithm of the number of accessible states, also diverges as the mass inflation singularity is approached.