I have tried thinking as I did about infinity a few years ago, taking one step at a time and seeing how far I can go. This time I worked backwards, trying to understand the origin of a black hole’s gravity. Where does it start?
In the case of a black hole that originates as a collapsing star, the star’s gravity is already there, and measurable, before the collapse. The gravitational field of the black hole can be calculated in terms of the gravitation of the original star.
Black holes are generally presented, at least to lay audiences, as things of enormous gravitational attraction. I think the next step in my line of thought would have to be to ask if the gravity at the event horizon is any stronger than the gravity would have been at the surface of the original star. If it is not, then there is no “escaping” gravity to consider; no one/nothing outside the event horizon experiences gravity beyond that of the original star.
