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Black holes possess a gravitational force so great it can pull anything in. Including light. So placing these side by side, If I were to shoot a laser pointer out of a cannon at a black hole, and also be standing stationary pointing a laser at a black hole, conventional logic would tell me that the light from the cannon-shot laser would be traveling faster than light once captured in the gravitational field of the black hole, as opposed to the light from my stationary laser in the same gravitational field. Am I right? or am I confusing some part of the theory relativity in here?

Thanks!

DMK564
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You don't need to get confused with black holes. Just stand outside a train and shine a laser, and have your brother inside a train shime another laser. Your light would be traveling at speed c with respect to you. If the train was going at a speed c/2, youd conclude also that his light was going again speed 3c/2, faster than you.

As @WillO implied, if you don't know that relativity says that the speed of light is the same in all coordinate frames, meaning as seen by any observer (say inertial ones for the simpler special relativity), then you don't know any relativity. The answer above is that you would your brother's light also going at speed c. In relativity speeds don't add simply. And one c plus another c/2 winds up adding to c.

Black holes are more complex, you need general relativity, but locally the same thing is true: observers will always measure c in their local coordinates.

If you're getting interested in these kinds of things it's good. You have gone beyond getting any value from reading simple popular articles on physics. Take a couple serious courses, even online, there's a lot basic stuff that is useful to then understand black holes. I think that what @WillO was hinting at, much more clearly and concise than I ever could.

Bob Bee
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