A world-renowned physicist seeks gravity’s true nature and finds wisdom in embracing its force in her life
Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body’s buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, dreaming of the experience of flying free from Earth’s pull. And as a physicist, discovering new sides to gravity’s irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In The Beauty of Falling, de Rham shares captivating stories about her quest to gain intimacy with gravity, to understand both its feeling and fundamental nature. Her life’s pursuit led her from a twist of fate that snatched away her dream of becoming an astronaut to an exhilarating breakthrough at the very frontiers of gravitational physics.
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? De Rham 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.” De Rham shares 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.
- 232 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Information
Publisher
Princeton University PressYear
2024Print ISBN
9780691237503
9780691237480
eBook ISBN
9780691237497
Topic
Physical SciencesSubtopic
Philosophy & Ethics in ScienceTable of contents
- Cover Page
- More praise for The Beauty of Falling
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction: A Journey through Gravity
- 1. A Universal Language
- 2. The Gravity of Our Curved Reality
- 3. Gravity and the Force Within
- 4. Predicting Our Own Fall
- 5. Expanding into Nothingness
- 6. The Graviton, What a Particle!?
- 7. Our Lives in Pursuit of Gravity
- Conclusion: Creatures of Gravity
- Bibliography
- Index
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Yes, you can access The Beauty of Falling by Claudia de Rham in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Physical Sciences & Philosophy & Ethics in Science. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.