Oh, don’t feed me that. I saw Shapiro in a TV interview last night and he said that light speed slows down when the light passes through a gravity field. He proved it in the 1960s with his radar signals.

What Einstein said happened, in his 1911 theory, is that atomic oscillations slow down in a gravity field AND light speed slows down in a gravity field.

This is a normal function of atoms, which emit light, and it's a normal function of the light they emit.

Nothing is “screwed up” in a gravity well. Light speed slows down in a gravity well and atomic oscillations slow down in a gravity well. So, the local slowly-oscillating atoms (atomic clocks) in that same gravity field measure the slow-moving light speed to be “c”. There is nothing “screwed up” about that. That’s just the way things are. It is not all of “time itself” that is distorted in a gravity well, it is the oscillation rates of the atoms, and the frequency of light they emit, that slows down, along with the speed of light too.

Shapiro’s clocks were on earth, and that’s what allowed him to notice the slow down in the speed of the returning radar EM waves as they passed near the sun. They don’t slow down if they don’t pass near the sun. They do slow down when they pass through the strong gravity field near the sun.