The Beauty of Falling

Claudia de Rham

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? Claudia reveals how great minds—from Newton and Einstein to Stephen Hawking, Andrea Ghez, and Roger Penrose 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’s theory breaks down, leading her to develop a new theory of “massive gravity.” Claudia will share with us how her life’s path turned from a precipitous fall to an exquisite flight toward the discovery of something entirely new about our surprising, gravity-driven universe.

Claudia de Rham is a Swiss theoretical physicist working at the interface of gravity, cosmology, and particle physics and is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. She was one of the UK finalists in the Physical Sciences and Engineering category of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2018 for revitalising the theory of massive gravity and won the award in 2020.

And after the break ..

Please remember that the meeting slot after the tea break is vacant awaiting volunteers . If you would like to fill this slot with a talk, an image expo, a fun quiz or anything astronomy related please get in touch. There is no regular speaker for this slot and without volunteers there will not be a second session.

£2 for Members and £3 for Guests.