grayness

The event horizon of a black hole is the bounds at which its escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. That means light can't permanently escape a black hole if it comes that close, or closer.

At the surface of the earth, the escape velocity is much slower. And a bullet travels much, much slower than a photon (and much slower, as well, than the earth's escape velocity). A baseball, even slower. But you can shoot a bullet quite high. You can even throw a baseball rather high.

Now, if you shoot a bullet, it can hit a plane. If it's a big plane, you won't even slow it down much, as long as you don't hit anything vital.

Now imagine you had a gun that shot very fast bullets. They might even make it into orbit- which wouldn't be escaping, just a permanent fall around the planet. Well, permanent, until the orbit decayed, anyway.

Now imagine the bullets are light, and the earth is a black hole.

So, my conclusions are these:

First, you could see below the event horizon of a black hole, if you were close. You are the plane. The photons are bullets. You are scooping them up, and carrying them on with you. They may slow you a tiny bit, but remember energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. That means their mass equivalent is their energy, divided by the speed of light squared: tiny. So they don't slow you much. So you can see down there.

Now you can't see the singularity itself, the point to which all the mass the black hole has at least theoretically collapsed... but you can see "inside".

Second, there might be bands of orbiting light... I don't know enough physics to know if that is possible, but just thinking about it to myself, it seems like it could be the case.

That's my Saturday afternoon thinking.