The fans roar to life, pumping air upwards at 260 kilometers per hour. Wearing a baggy blue jumpsuit, red helmet, and plastic goggles, claudia de rum When you step into the glass room… Whoosh! Suddenly, she was suspended in the air, her wide grin on her face excited by her simulated experience of free fall.
I persuaded de Lamme, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, to go indoor skydiving with me at iFLY London. It seemed appropriate, given that much of her life has been dedicated to exploring the limits and true nature of gravity. And, at least on this occasion, jumping out of the plane was not an option.
As she explains in her new book, the beauty of falling, de Rum trained to be a pilot and then an astronaut, but medical problems ruined his chance for the ultimate escape from gravity. But as a theorist, she continued to delve deeper into this most familiar and mysterious force, making her mark by asking her fundamental question: “What is the weight of gravity?” Ta.
That means she is a graviton, a hypothetical particle that is thought to carry this force. If it had mass, as de Rum suspects, that would open a new window on gravity. Among other things, we may finally discover the “gravity rainbow” that betrays the existence of gravitons, and the long-awaited quantum description of gravity.
When De Rum is suspended in the air, she makes it look easy. She will ascend soon…
