Claudia de Rham has spent much of her life dedicated to exploring the limits and true nature of gravity. As she describes in her new book, The Beauty of Falling, de Rham trained to be a pilot and then an astronaut.

To demonstrate gravity’s effects, New Scientist took her indoor skydiving at iFLY London, explaining how gravity acts on every cell of your body in the same way. Yet, gravity still isn’t fully understood. It doesn’t fit into the mould of the other fundamental forces, and quantum theory can’t yet explain it. For her part, de Rham has sought to make progress by thinking deeply about gravitons, the hypothetical carrier of the force of gravity. Each of the fundamental forces is carried by an equivalent “boson” particle – some have zero mass, others have a very small mass. De Rham wanted to know: what is the graviton’s mass?

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