OK, here is another attempt at explanation; it is a variation of the second one I proposed above, but in a way that does not rely on arguing by definition.
Imagine the (charged, if you want) star before collapsing into a black hole. If you have taken some basic physics courses, you must know that the total mass and charge can be determined by measurements at infinity: the integral of the normal component of the electric field over a sphere enclosing the star gives you the charge, up to a proportionality constant (Gauss's Law), and the same thing happens for the gravitational field and mass in Newton's theory, with a mathematically more complicated but conceptually equivalent statement holding in Einstein's.
Now, as the star begins to collapse, the mass and charge results that you get applying Gauss's Law at infinity cannot change (because they are conserved quantities). So the gravitational and electromagnetic fields that you measure at infinity do not change either. All this keeps applying when the black hole forms, so you keep feeling the same gravitational and electric forces as you did before.
Thanks for your perseverance :-)
Yeah, you’re right, putting it this way at least seems more satisfactory, it certainly doesn’t trigger the by-definition alarm bells. (The bit about mass and charge being conserved quantities almost says the same thing, but I think the fact that conservation laws stem from observation rather than just labeling things makes the difference.)
However, by switching the point of view to sphere integrals at infinity it sort of side-steps addressing the original question, i.e. exactly what happens at the event horizon such that mass...
In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.