Claudia de Rham on playing with gravity
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Claudia de Rham has rather an unusual relationship with gravity.
While she has spent her career exploring its fundamental nature, much of her free time has involved trying to defy it - from scuba diving in the Indian Ocean to piloting small aircraft over the Canadian waterfalls. Her ultimate ambition was to escape gravity’s clutches altogether and become an astronaut, a dream that was snatched away by an unlikely twist of fate.
However, Claudia has no regrets - and says defying gravity for much of her life has helped her to truly understand it.
As Professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London, she now grapples with deep mathematics, where the fields of particle physics, gravity and cosmology intersect, on a quest to understand how the universe really works. She is a pioneer of the theory of massive gravity, a theory which could take us beyond even Einstein’s theory of relativity and shed light on why the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.
Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Beth Eastwood
Transcript
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| 0:51.7 | My guest today has quite an unusual relationship with gravity. While she spent her career |
| 0:57.6 | exploring its fundamental nature, much of her free time has involved trying to defy it, from scuba |
| 1:03.5 | diving in the Indian Ocean to piloting small aircraft over Canadian waterfalls. Her ultimate dream |
| 1:09.8 | was to escape gravity's clutches all together |
| 1:12.4 | and become an astronaut, a dream that was snatched away by an unlikely twist of fate. |
| 1:18.1 | But Claudia Duram has no regrets. I've had to defy gravity for most of my life, she says, |
| 1:24.0 | in an effort to understand it. As Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, |
| 1:29.7 | she now grapples with deep mathematics, where the fields of particle physics, gravity and cosmology, |
| 1:35.2 | meet on a quest to understand how the universe really works. She's a pioneer in a subject called |
| 1:42.3 | massive gravity, which might take us beyond even Einstein's |
| 1:46.6 | theory of relativity and shed light on why the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. |
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