Photon "reference frame" and determinism

[Alex K]

Why would you say that no time passes for a photon?

Because it's moving at the speed of light. I'm pretty sure as Alex said, that it's just considered "broken" because of a /0. But while I'm pretty poor at math, it seems to me that you can see that the limit of things moving closer to the speed of light is that the passage of time is approaching a zero rate. The same goes for stuff stuck in a black hole, no? That they are essentially frozen in time relative to our perspective?

There's a difference between stating that no time passes for a photon, and going to its rest frame though. Following the path of a photon and calculating its proper time is a mathematically unproblematic operation which simply yields a 0. Going to a reference frame where that photon is at rest, that's where you get the /0.

The time passing for an object falling into a black hole is super subtle, because in General Relativity, comparing the time passing at different points in space to the time passing for you is not a unique procedure. What one can say is that objects falling onto a black hole appear to freeze on its event horizon to a hovering observer. Whether it "actually" falls in or not in finite outside observer time is not a well-defined question.