How do gravitons escape black holes to tell the universe about their gravity?
In 1991 I posed the following question to David Schramm while we were on a solar eclipse trip. He did not blink an eye in answering but I really could not follow his rationale. If a photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force and a graviton is supposedly the carrier of the gravitational force, how can the gradient (force) of the gravitational well of a black hole be sensed if neither photons nor gravitons can escape? If the ‘information’ of how massive the black hole is gone forever, how does a body know how strongly to be attracted to the hole? If I cannot feel any gravitons from the black hole why would I be pulled into orbit around it if I approached from a safe distance? Why would spacetime warp if it does not know a massive body exists next door? These questions have bothered me for 19 years now. I hypothesized that there would be such a thing as a “Fermi age/length” (not its value) when a teenager so I know that I am both very smart and very dumb but this one perplexes me.
