THE followers roar into life, pumping air upwards at 260 kilometres per hour. Decked out in a saggy blue jumpsuit, purple helmet and plastic goggles, Claudia de Rham steps ahead right into a glass chamber and… whoosh! Suddenly she is suspended in mid-air, a large grin on her face, thrilling to the simulated expertise of free fall.
I had persuaded de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, to come back indoor skydiving with me at iFLY London. It appeared becoming, on condition that a lot of her life has been devoted to exploring the bounds and true nature of gravity – and launching ourselves out of a airplane wasn’t an choice, at the least on this event.
As she describes in her new guide, The Beauty of Falling, de Rham educated to be a pilot after which an astronaut, solely for a medical downside to scupper her possibilities of the last word escape from gravity. But she has gone on to discover this most acquainted and mysterious power in a extra profound means, as a theorist, and made an impression by asking a radical query: what does gravity weigh?
By that she means the graviton, the hypothetical particle thought to hold this power. If it has mass, as de Rham suspects, that might open a brand new window onto gravity. Among different issues, we would lastly spot a “gravitational rainbow” that might betray the existence of gravitons – and with them, a long-sought quantum description of gravity.
As de Rham floats on air, she makes it look straightforward. She is quickly ascending to…