Dayton Beer

Notre Dame burning on April 15. Photo: LeLaisserPasserA38 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) The flames that erupted through the roof of the majestic Notre Dame de Paris last week gave us a shocking reminder of the fragile nature of history. Architecture is a part of the record of our existence on earth. Old buildings tell us what times were like in our communities and around the world before we came. They're like postcards from the past. When it comes to breweries, a lot of those postcards are missing. When I researched Dayton Beer: A History of Brewing in the Miami Valley , I wanted to locate as many original breweries as I could. Dayton itself had so many I had to make a map to help me keep track of them. Map of old Dayton breweries. Composite graphic by Timothy R. Gaffney, with 1875 and 1869 maps. But when I went looking for them, I found very few still standing. In most cases, newer buildings, parks or parking lots had replace...

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 ...