Kate Gardner reviews The Beauty of Falling: a Life in Pursuit of Gravity by Claudia de Rham Claudia de Rham decided early in life she wanted to be an astronaut. Her peripatetic childhood meant she spoke several languages, but imperfectly, and was drawn to science as a universal language – a more reliable base from which to understand the world. As her ambition to go into space developed, she learned to scuba dive and to fly planes, having heard these are desirable skills for astronauts.
Years of intense training appeared to pay off when, in 2009, de Rahm made it to the final round of astronaut selection for the European Space Agency. In the end, she passed every test except the medical screening, which picked up latent tuberculosis – ruling her out not only in 2009 but forever. Thankfully, de Rahm had also been pursuing a career in theoretical physics.
So when her astronaut dream evaporated, she threw herself into the hardest challenge she’d ever experienced: understanding gravity. Her new book The Beauty of Falling: a Life in Pursuit of Gravity is by no means an autobiography wrapped up in popular science, but it does use snippets from de Rham’s life story to explore the science of gravity. Sometimes the connection is straightforward: learning to dive and to fly provides some great visuals for explaining the basics of gravity and its interaction with other major forces.
Other parallels are less obvious. Having moved around a lot as a child and as a researcher, de Rha.