"Black holes may not effect the light through mass but it can curve the spacetime to such a degree that the space the light is traveling across is warped such that the light does not escape while the black hole exists. Imagine a ray of light is trying to cross the path of this black hole above but space itself is pulled inwards and streched making the trip longer then it elsewise would be. Light is travelling through space but the space itself gets warped such that the path of the light is a spiral towards the center of the black hole. This gravitation also effects time such that it effectively takes forever to cross this vastly stretched and warped region of space, or until the black hole itself ceases to exist." --Ariel Williams - Adriano

Jay Wacker adds details: "4.) General relativity allows space to be mixed with time. Inside the event horizon of a black hole, a mass has caused a sufficient distortion to space-time, that time and space are interchanged (specifically the radial direction interchanges its role with time) 5.) What distinguishes time from space is that particle inextricably go forward in a time-like direction, unlike spatial directions where you can wave your hand forward and backwards just as easily. 6.) Inside a black hole, because the radial direction and time are interchanged, all particles inextricably move toward smaller radial values, unfortunately for those particles, this ride can only go on so long because the radial direction ends at the center of the black hole -- the singularity. 7.) Finally, there is the gravitational redshift. The wavelengths of particles become longer (or lower energy) as they travel from close to the black hole to far from the black hole. At the event horizon, the redshift becomes infinite, meaning that the wavelength of a massless particle becomes infinite and its corresponding energy becomes zero. Massless particles without energy essentially don't exist, so in essence a photon emitted at the event horizon is redshifted into oblivion." http://www.quora.com/Black-H... - Adriano

Can photons really get red-shifted into oblivion? That sounds like a violation of the law of conservation of matter and energy. If it doesn't spiral into the singularity, wouldn't it just hang out just shy of the event horizon in a Zeno's paradox-like existence, getting redshifted to almost but not quite zero energy? (At least until it interacted with matter streaming into the black hole.) - Victor Ganata

hard to say exactly, Victor, but I think of the singularity as a logical point where everything can be true (possibly violating the law of contradiction :-), then gets reset [it to bit] and recycled [bit to it]. So the law of conservation hopefully holds for the system when considered as states simultaneously before- and after-wormhole. - Adriano

'If black holes have a finite entropy, they should also have a finite temperature. In particular, they would come to equilibrium with a thermal gas of photons. This means that black holes would not only absorb photons, but they would also have to emit them in the right amount to maintain detailed balance.' —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.... Thanks, Leonard Susskind! - Akiva

Here are further details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Akiva

Susskind's Holographic Principle is truly mind-bending. - Akiva

Another way of looking at it: Mass and gravity are only related through force. Photos don't have mass, so there's no gravitational force against them, but they also have no inertia, so it doesn't take any force to deflect them. It becomes a matter of zero-over-zero, and they just integrate away so photons behave like anything else, with the same rate of accelleration, but usually with much less deflection because of their high velocity. (Mind you this is a 'Daddy, why is the sky blue' quality of answer. I could be completely wrong but if I say it with enough confidence the kids are satisfied and hey, I might be right.) - Kevin Fox

Kevin, per Newton, F=ma=GMm/r^2, thus a=GM/r^2 -- so yes, given huge mass of a black hole the acceleration in the first approximation would be inescapably large :-) - Adriano

Supersymmetry and dark matter. Goodnight. - Eric Logan

Eric, we're on daylight saving, it's not that dark outside. Wake up without your Lie superalgebra! :-) - Adriano

Boom. New universe - http://phys.org/news... - Ken Sheppardson

Mass changes the shape of space, hence light travels in not so straight lines. [relative to our perspective, but if we rode the back of a photon going around a black hole, we might think we were traveling in a straight line.] - Joe

Terrific article! - Aryo