Going faster than the speed of light?

"Going faster than the speed of light?"

"So light travels fastest in vacuum, and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Right?"

We've tested it, right.

"But what happens if you shine a laser beam directly into a super massive black hole?"

The black hole will recoil very slightly.

"Since photons are affected by gravity, shouldn't it speed it up past the speed of light in vacuum?"

Photons have no mass. So no. Light is affected by the shape of spacetime, which is the limit of "affected by gravity".

Please note that the speed of light "slows down" near intense gravitational sources, as compared to far away from those sources. So light not only does not speed up, it appears to slow down:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_delay

So you have a solar sail, very reflective, and shine a light on it. Why can that never exceed c? Because as it speed up, the incoming light is redder and redder, and the thrust is decreasing with each second... plus the Universe shines on the front of the sail, it it gets bluer and bluer and more intense too.

Laser beam, flashlight, candlelight, it doesn't matter, light is light, and it always travels at the speed of light, in a vacuum. Since the escape velocity inside a blackhole is past the speed of light, the light beams would simply fall into the black hole and never be able to climb back out of it.

Yes, the photon, as a wave function, only reacts to the inertia of the geodesic path, its relative energy and other quantum specific qualities can only present their effect as an observed event. The photon is only a wave function until observed by only one observational event, the effect of that event on the observer is second hand information; an electron may move several times, and is often altered beyond the original observation. Remember photons have zero mass until they have an event with a observer, of which an electron is a qualified observer. Mr. Einstein preferred momentum to mass, as its effective energy.

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Time slows down in intense gravitational field, so c stays constant....maybe?