stingc

Plenty of new things have been figured out, but the basics are the same. You mostly have the right idea, although you've confused some details. All that stuff about going faster than light is incorrect for example.

I'll try to describe a black hole intuitively. This is very very minimal btw:

If you think about the gravitational field of a planet, it obviously gets stronger as you get closer to it. There's a limit though. If you dug a hole into the planet's surface, you'd find that the field starts getting small again. It vanishes completely at the center (by symmetry).

So a planet has the most gravitational pull at its surface. This suggests a very simple way of increasing the maximum field: let the planet collapse into itself without losing any mass.

A black hole is something that has collapsed as much as possible. If you get close enough to one, its gravitational field is so strong that not even light could ever fully escape.

It is important to say that black holes are not cosmic vacuum cleaners. The collapse process only increases the maximum gravitational field. It doesn't affect anything far away. If the sun could turn into a black hole right now, the earth would continue moving along in exactly the same orbit. Strange things only happen if you go too close.

These 'strange things' are what really make black holes interesting I think. In general relativity, gravity is a manifestation of geometry. It turns out that geometry doesn't quite work the way you learned in high school. There are very minute differences that give rise to the effects we associate with gravity. It is rather difficult to think of the attraction between the sun and the earth this way, and it isn't really needed (although it can be done). Newton's old theory works fine for that. When you start to talk about black holes, though, the geometrical viewpoint is unavoidable. Regular Euclidean geometry completely breaks down.

The replacement describes both space and time as a single intertwined structure. So both time and space act very differently near a black hole. Expanding on that more precisely would take many pages to explain properly.

Arsenic is right that time is a measure of change, but it can be quantified in various ways. You have to be very careful though because different people might quantify it differently. When someone talks about time "slowing down," or something like that, they mean that time as quantified by one person (in an apparently reasonable way) does not agree with someone else's apparently reasonable version of time. That's probably confusing, but it can be made precise. People should be much more careful about discussing time in relativity because most of the time their statements do end up being completely subjective (I'm including physicists here too). Its possible to do it right though.

denim, just like time, space can be quantified in different ways. There are definitions in which the radius of a black hole is infinite, but it doesn't mean much to say that. Someone looking at the hole will see something that certainly doesn't seem infinite. Its better to measure its surface area (there's more than one reasonable definition of surface too -- just choose one), which is always finite, and would be measured the same by everyone.

My degrees are in physics. I'm at Penn State right now (there's a big gravity group here). Companies don't hire anyone to do this kind of research.