The Beauty of Falling is a memoir/teaser for Claudia de Rham’s theory about heavy gravitons I claim it’s a teaser since it doesn’t actually cover any of the math involved in her theory. In fact, I was nonplused by her statement that with a high mass graviton could exist, since my understanding was that gravity waves travelled at the speed of light and anything that had to travel at the speed of light had to be massless.
(A book I later read talked about how photons can have
gravitational effect, since spacetime isn’t warped just by mass, but also by
energy due to the mass-energy equivalence)
The memoir part of the story is pretty amazing—born in
Lausanne and then having an international lifestyle, she spoke multiple
languages with an accent, which apparently can be annoying as everyone you meet
tells you it’s amazing how quickly you learned their language, not knowing that
she was a native speaker.
A large part of the book covers her attempts to become an
astronaut and making it deep into the selection process until she was
disqualified for having a latent TB infection acquired during her time in
Madagascar.
I happen to know professional physicists and I can attest to
their extreme travel lifestyle. It’s definitely not an easy lifestyle that’s
conducive to raising kids and I can only imagine doing so while attempting to
qualify for the European astronautics program makes it even more
challenging—she describes taking flying lessons as soon as she could afford
them as part of her plan.
I enjoyed the book, but I’m afraid I didn’t come away with
any more understanding of how heavy gravitons change how we view gravity than
before reading the book.
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