Black holes, gravity wells and... beer?
A black hole. Event Horizon Telescope image, courtesy National Science Foundation. © 2019 Timothy R. Gaffney Astronomers made headlines last week when they released the first-ever picture of a black hole —an unimaginably weird place with a gravitational field so strong nothing that falls into it can escape—not even light. What does that have to do with beer? Um, well, nothing. But, strangely enough, it has a lot to do with my book. One way to think of a black hole and its gravitational field is as a hole in the bottom of a funnel-shaped well—a gravity well . “Gravity well” was a term I learned as a teen when I read Arthur C. Clarke’s The Promise of Space —a non-fiction book the great science fiction writer published in 1968 as a kind of companion to his novel (and the film) 2001: A Space Odyssey . Every planet, moon and chunk of rock has its own “gravity well,” where its gravitational field can influence other objects. The concept popped back into my mind in 2017 ...