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.

Sadly due to the Red Heat Alert, the unsuitability of our Standalone meeting room under those conditions and reservations of our speaker to travel under those conditions it is sensible to move the event to a Zoom only option, please purchase the link from the MemberMoJo store as usual (https://membermojo.co.uk/ldas/store).

Like the rest of you the committee was really looking forward to meeting Prof Claudia de Rham in person, sadly not to be (this time) !

And after the break ..

Gordon Ewen: 'The Challenge of Long Focal Length Solar Imaging'.

I hope you will have read Gordon’s newsletter article on the revelation of the effects of tube currents from the BAA Chichester meeting and the beautiful job he did on insulating his white light telescope.  Gordon will cover the problems and how solutions significantly improved his solar imaging.  As always there will be some stunning images and video.

Please feel free to e-mail the Chair (n_m_gray@btinternet.com) if you would like to speak on any astronomy related talk after the coffee break.