GTOM said:
"One wouldn't seriously believe that the naval vessels "speed up" as they move away from the equator, approaching infinite speed at the poles, because they can move more degrees of longitude per hour."
That analogy still don't explain, why can't light come out, if it don't speed up or slow down...
If it is sucked in by a whirl, so it can't come out, it is speed may not change compared to the water, but change to an outside observer.
In the end, it all boils down to the mathematics. The popularizations are just an attempt to "sugar-coat" the math. So, to really understand what's going on and get the correct answers, you need to understand the math. If you're going from just the popularizations, you may or may not get the right answers without the math to guide you, as the popularizations are not always perfect.
That said, there are a number of different approaches one can use. The river model,
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0411060, may be particularly easy to grasp for non experts.
This paper presents an under-appreciated way to conceptualize stationary black holes, which we call the river model. The river model is mathematically sound, yet simple enough that the basic picture can be understood by non-experts. In the river model, space itself flows like a river through a flat background, while objects move through the river according to the rules of special relativity. In a spherical black hole, the river of space falls into the black hole at the Newtonian escape velocity, hitting the speed of light at the horizon. Inside the horizon, the river flows inward faster than light, carrying everything with it.
One thing I don't like about the river model is related to the central idea of space flowing. Any attempt to measure such a flow with instruments is doomed to failure according to special relativity, so it's a bit suspicious that the explanation involves a concept that's not measurable.
That said, it does provide an easy-to-grasp model that explains the prominent features of the horizon in a way that's mathematically correct and hopefully easy to grasp.
Another approach, which is more geometrical, requires a bit of SR to appreciate properly. THis is Marolf's space-time embedding, given in
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9806123. This shows how one can draw the space-time diagram for the r-t plane of a black hole, a 2 dimensional graph, on a particular 3-dimensional curved surface. It's an embedding diagram for the space-time diagrams - or to put it another way, general relativity can be thought of as drawing the space-time diagrams of special relativity on curved surfaces rather than on "flat" pieces of paper - at least if you don't have any more than one spatial dimension.
To appreciate this model, one does have to understand special relativity enough to know what a space-time diagram is. If one wants to apply it to moving observers, one needs in addition some familiarity with the Lorentz transform.
Around page 11, Marolf discusses the part about light not escaping.
Note that the two light rays given by Y = 0, X = ±T (shown in fig. 14) lie completely
in our surface. The reader will immediately see that these light rays do not move along the
flanges at all (since they stay at Y = 0) and thus neither of these light rays actually move
away from the black hole. Instead, the light rays are trapped near the black hole forever.
It is also clear that these light rays divide our surface into four regions (I, II, III, and IV)
much as in figs. 4 and 6. Thus, an observer in region II of our spacetime cannot cross one
of these light rays without traveling faster than the speed of light. Observers in this region
are trapped inside the black hole.
Regions I and II on this diagram are the inside and outside of the black hole. Regions III and IV are white-hole regions. The white hole regions (interior and exterior) an interesting feature that arises from the Schwarzschild geometry which are not necessarily found in a more generic black hole. If you find them confusing, you can ignore regions III and IV if you like, they won't be reachable from our space-time.
