Ep454 - Claudia de Rham | The Beauty of Falling

Published: June 11, 2024, 7 a.m.

World-renowned physicist Claudia de Rham visits Google to discuss her book \u201cThe Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity.\u201d

Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, she experimented with her body\u2019s buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, she soared over Canadian waterfalls before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, she dreamt of the experience of flying free from the Earth\u2019s pull. And as a physicist, she discovered new sides to gravity\u2019s irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein\u2019s general theory of relativity. In The Beauty of Falling, she shares captivating stories about her quest to gain intimacy with gravity, to understand both its feeling and fundamental nature. Her life\u2019s pursuit led her away from her dream of becoming an astronaut to an exhilarating breakthrough at the very frontiers of gravitational physics.

While many of us presume to know gravity quite well, the brightest scientists in history have yet to fully answer the simple question: what exactly is gravity? De Rham reveals how great minds\u2014from Newton and Einstein to Stephen Hawking - led her to the edge of knowledge about this fundamental force. She found hints of a hidden side to gravity at the particle level where Einstein\u2019s theory breaks down, leading her to develop a new theory of \u201cmassive gravity.\u201d De Rham shares how her life\u2019s path turned from a precipitous fall to an exquisite flight toward the discovery of something entirely new about our surprising, gravity-driven universe.

Visit http://youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle/ to watch the video.