The Life Scientific: Claudia de Rham

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<p>Claudia de Rham has rather an unusual relationship with gravity.</p><p>While she has spent her career exploring its fundamental nature, much of her free time has involved trying to defy it - from scuba diving in the Indian Ocean to piloting small aircraft over the Canadian waterfalls. Her ultimate ambition was to escape gravity’s clutches altogether and become an astronaut, a dream that was snatched away by an unlikely twist of fate.</p><p>However, Claudia has no regrets - and says defying gravity for much of her life has helped her to truly understand it.</p><p>As Professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London, she now grapples with deep mathematics, where the fields of particle physics, gravity and cosmology intersect, on a quest to understand how the universe really works. She is a pioneer of the theory of massive gravity, a theory which could take us beyond even Einstein’s theory of relativity and shed light on why the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.</p><p>Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced for BBC Studios by Beth Eastwood Reversion for World Service by Minnie Harrop</p>