There are a handful of replies already and I'm not any sort of authority on this subject. But, I'd like to share a few of the things about this that have made s

There are a handful of replies already and I'm not any sort of authority on this subject. But, I'd like to share a few of the things about this that have made sense to me; maybe someone will add to or correct one of them and I'll learn something more. Black holes and gravity are hard to get a satisfactory grasp on for laymen (like me) because they behave in ways that are unlike anything else in the natural, observable world around us. People try to understand difficult concepts by relating them to familiar things, but gravity and black holes don't relate to anything we're familiar with. Gravity for example isn't, we think, a "thing". It's a property, or a consequence. [1] Lots of people are looking for some way to relate it to the physics of particles and electromagnetic forces, but that hasn't happened yet. So, gravity doesn't escape, or travel, because it isn't a "thing". There's no particle of gravity. There is a force, in that when we observe large masses, they seem to be acted upon by some kind of invisible action, but that force is actually a consequence of things attempting to travel in straight lines along a curved surface. Changes in gravity do travel, apparently at the speed of light. So, in that sense, the gravitational effect of a black hole does extend beyond its event horizon. But, that's totally okay, because gravity itself isn't a thing and doesn't travel and therefore doesn't need to escape a black hole. Rather, a black hole is a consequence of gravity, or relativity. It's a division-by-zero [2] in the equations that describe matter, gravity, and curved spacetime. Thinking of black holes as being somehow similar to really really dense planets is one of the misconceptions that misled me for a long time. They are instead more of a place where physics, as we understand it so far, stops working. That place has a boundary region where physics still mostly works, and things happen there that we can sort of understand and relate to. We can observe some of the effects of this extreme curvature of spacetime in this boundary region. But beyond that, the curvature goes to infinity and volume goes to 0 and time stops existing. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdIjYBtnvZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdIjYBtnvZU -- A video with 3 Blue 1 Brown on Feynman's "lost lecture", which describes gravity in geometrical terms. There is also a Feynman lecture on this: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dox03/physics_friend_of_mine_says_that_a_black_hole_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dox03/physics_...