Dissipation of light?

[evilbutterfly]

As for Verrucket's example about light splitting: if you have glasses, you've probably noticed that if you look out the edges of your glasses you'll see double of an object. One image is the object as seen with the light going straight to your eye, the other is where some of the light hits your glasses and gets curved into your eye. Think of a black hole as just a bit thing to mess with the light that goes through.

And uh, don't black holes have such huge gravity that light can't escape, hence them being "black"? That's what they tell me in school, but just from what Guido said (and from how the always dumb things down) I'm guessing there may be way more to it...

For the flashlight thing: you're thinking of the light from the flashlight or star as one "thing" of light. What you need to realize is that the beam coming out of a flashlight or anything is a bunch of light waves all coming out of the same point. Each individual lightwave goes on and on and on, but they spread out from each other. The light itself isn't dimming, but the various waves are getting farther apart. For example, a good laser (not some crappy cheap laser pointer, a REAL laser) can shoot a concentrated beam of light to one point far far away without it dissipating, because the light waves are all directed out the same way to make sure the light stays in one solid beam. That's why a laser's concentrated energy beam is so stronger whereas like, a microwave, which has energy flying around all over, is so weak.