Dear Jim,
Thanks for your interest in my work. Concerning your questions:
You wrote:"How does a quantum of Hawking radiation escape from the event horizon when the gravitation just above the horizon is only a tiny bit less intense than that which can capture light? Is the necessary escape velocity considered in the calculation for Hawking radiation or is it, as it seems, ignored?"
Answer: It is quantum tunneling process. Some detail can be found here.
You wrote: "Why is the loss of information when mass falls within an event horizon considered a paradox when any decay of an atom anywhere in the universe will produce particles with universal properties, and when with the expansion of the universe ever-greater portions of the universe go beyond informative? And presumably, from the time of the Big Bang to some time after, there was a vast increase in information created as different types of particles formed, as atoms and molecules combined. Isn't that a problem for the "conservation of information"?"
Answer: I think that the situation is clarified in my Essay, but I will repeat it here. There are two fundamental problems in the case of black hole evaporation: i) the thermality of Hawking radiation implies that the pure states of in-falling particles are translated in mixed states. ii) the entanglement problem. It concerns the entanglement structure of the wave function associated to the particle pair creation of Hawking quanta. Thus, one needs to know the part of the wave function in the interior of the horizon that is the part of the wave function associated to the particle having negative energy (interior, in-falling modes). This is exactly the part of the wave function which in the Hawking original computation gets entangled with the part of the wave function outside, i.e. the part of the wave function associated to the particle having positive energy which escapes from the black hole.
You wrote "How does mass infalling past an event horizon not disintegrate, having entered an elevation with gravitation so intense that light cannot escape, with tidal effects so severe that atoms and even nuclei would be spaghettied? And if c goes to zero going out doesn't v go to c going in?"
Answer: Classical general relativity tell us that all the geodesic of in-falling matter will end their traveling in the singularity in the core of the black hole. In my knowledge c does not go to zero.
Thanks again for your interest, I wish you good luck in the Contest.
Cheers, Ch.