Q&A – How do we find gravity's true nature?

We spoke to Professor Claudia de Rham about her journey towards becoming a theoretical physicist, studying one of life’s biggest mysteries: gravity.

Professor Claudia de Rham from Imperial College London’s Department of Physics is a cosmologist who tests and develops models that can explain the evolution of the universe. Part of her work is to study the nature of gravity, and to understand how it impacted the Early Universe.

This year, she has published a new book, The Beauty of Falling, which has been featured in coverage by Nature and New Scientist. We spoke to her about how training to be an astronaut prepared her for a life as a researcher, and reshaping expectations about what it means to be a theoretical physicist. 

Q – Tell us a bit about your journey. How did you come to fall in love with gravity?

A – I did fall in love with gravity, and I knew that before writing the book but one thing that did come alive when I was writing is how much I loved gravity from an early age.

When I was young, I was always moving from one place to another, and gravity and nature was an opportunity to be part of something bigger – bigger than me, bigger than all of us.

My original dream was to become an astronaut. Lots of people have that dream at one point or another, but for me, this really became a fixed point where for almost two decades and everything I did was trying to reach that goal.

I really set a goal for my life path, and it didn't work out.  one of the messages of the book is that's okay. Most of us try to do something and it doesn't work out. 

I had been training for over 20 years and in the end got so close to it that I could almost see it – and then everything disappeared into thin air – but that’s okay. It’s part of the beauty of falling, and part of it is to learn from it.

Trying something and not succeeding is not a bad thing. It is part of who you are. Nowadays I do research in gravity and I do feel that I’m living my dream even more deeply than if I had been an astronaut because I'm really challenging gravity to even deeper levels.

Q – Do you think that your time training to become an astronaut shaped how you engage with science?

A – At many levels, yes. There's an extent in which how you set up your goals, and how you keep at them is very important for being a theoretical physicist, where it can be very competitive and uncomfortable sometimes.

Part of training to be an astronaut meant that I learnt how to scuba dive and fly a plane. A lot of those required that I put myself in emergency situations. Learning how to go out of catastrophic situations is very interesting, because, you have to follow your instincts to some extent but not too much and rely as well on elements which can sometimes feel counter-intuitive.

For instance, if your plane is stalling, it may be your natural instinct to try to pick the nose up. But that's worse, because then you have less lift, and you will literally fall down and possibly crash. So, you have to learn the logic of different procedures and combine that with instinct.

In the research we do, we explore new things where it's not known what the solution is and, sometimes, it’s quite uncomfortable. Sometimes, it does literally feel as if I no longer know what’s up and what’s down, so we have to follow the logic of the natural laws we’ve learnt in situations where things may seem counter-intuitive.

In the end, we also always need to make sure that our outcome makes sense and some level of physical intuition is very important for that.

Q – You’re surrounded by gravity research every day, but how would you want a reader who doesn’t do physics to appreciate the gravitational force?

A – I like the fact that you call it the gravitational force, because many people would have heard that gravity is different from the other forces in nature. Sometimes, it’s useful to describe gravity as the curvature of spacetime but in many aspects, gravity is very analogous to the other forces of nature like electromagnetism.

One thing for me that is really fascinating and beautiful about gravity is that it’s a universal phenomenon that connects everything. You can't evade gravity.

You can't shield yourself from gravity. Unlike the other forces of nature, gravity is always present. So, for instance – you and I – we’re connected through gravity because we are connected through spacetime.

If we wanted to communicate with some aliens on the other side of the universe that were made out of, let’s say, dark matter or another dark sector, the only certain way that we could communicate with them is with gravitational waves.

While gravity is the weakest force, it’s also the most important one. 

Q – Did you encounter any challenges in writing this book?

A – Never with the essential scientific ideas. But I think I was more excited about sharing what it means to be a physicist because I think that is what’s important. There’s this perspective of what it means to be a theoretical physicist and it’s not a perspective that’s always helpful or connected to the truth.

We represent research with a specific person whose made a major discovery and sometimes and there may be some lack of diversity in that respect. 

But more than just emphasising underrepresented people discovering things, I think what’s more helpful is realising that there’s never a single person or a single set of people within discovery.

A discovery doesn’t belong to a group of people. It belongs to the whole of society. Discoveries happen when societies are ready for them, and they’re not the product of people in an ivory tower that are trying to address very deep questions.

We should very much embrace the fact discoveries pass through all of us and are much more spontaneous than we may think, and our shared passion for science is part of that spontaneity.

So, the book is not just a series of statements about different natural laws, but it’s how we uncover things, what still confuses us, and how we’re getting along in that journey. I’ve learnt a lot about myself in the process of writing that book.

I always knew it but it made it even clearer to me how lucky we are – all of us – to be able to ask ourselves all these questions, get excited about science. It’s not new of course but it’s always worth sharing with others!

--

The Beauty of Falling is published by Princeton University Press, and is available to purchase online and in major book retailers.