Questions on Black Holes and Light...

So, I read a bit more about the alternate dimensions last night, and it's funny, because Stephen Hawking says that it's impossible to visualize the fourth dimension, when Lisa Randall with other theoretical physicists have recently found out how.
Of course, "A Brief History of Time", again, was published in 1989 - 1990.
I am currently getting a TON of books, not only be Hawking, but by Feynmann and some of his lectures, too, to get some variety. Once I'm done with this book, I'm going to read into "The Day Without a Yesterday" (I can't remember the author right now) which was published in 2005. It has to do with Le-something(can't remember his name either)'s work, with all his papers stored in a university in Belgium.
Back to Hawking, what I found was possibly a way to disprove that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. When he was talking about special relativity, Hawking says that this was when Einstein came up with General Relativity, which works with Gravity... The only problem is, no one can really evaluate the formula without having all their own measurements, which is very faulty and not very sufficient.
This leads to a few questions...
Does gravity have a lot to do with what I'm doing?
Yes, it does.
Should I pay more attention to gravity?
Indubitably, yes.
And so, I'm going to study this further, because I feel that there has to be something greater out there than this formula that so many have failed to use, and it seems that there has to be something much more sufficient, accurate, and describes more than just gravity between planetary and solar bodies.
I feel that the formula needs to be tweaked somehow, and can be, but at the moment (for me, at least) there's too many unknowns. I'll have to narrow that down.
Before I can do that, I want to know what each of the symbols mean, because there's one that I'm not really sure what it is. I think it's absolute velocity, but I'm not sure. I'm going to check up on that later.
What I also think is, that there has to be a material out there that can withstand going at speeds faster than light, and that the "light cone" of an event (I just learned about this myself -- you know how everything you can see is because light reflects off of it? a light-cone is a drawing of a three-axis graph that I'll post tomorrow, that's shaped like a cone, and anything outside of the cone cannot exist, apparently.) Isn't a boundary of matter, but everything that we can see. I mean, if you think about it, air that we can't see is being touched by light obviously, but whether it's pitch black or blindingly white, you can't see the air in front of you.
That's why it brings me some questions:
Is everything really affected by light in some way?
I mean, black holes can carry light into their gravitational fields, so that means they must be even more powerful, right?
I am going to continue on this journey through A Brief History in Time, and I'll post some diagrams tomorrow, promise this time.