We were kindly sent a copy of Claudia de Rham’s new book ‘The Beauty of Falling’, and asked irregular contributor Elinor Flavell to write this review.
Claudia de Rham’s “The Beauty of Falling” is not just a book about gravity: it is a book about how humanity understands the universe.
Starting with the different ways we can think about light, De Rham builds up the readers’ knowledge over seven chapters by talking about classical physics, Einstein’s special and general relativity, gravitational waves, and the curvature of spacetime – before finishing with her work on the graviton. With all that background information, you can fully appreciate how De Rham’s work on gravity fits into our wider understanding of the universe. Throughout the book she also links physics to parts of her frankly amazing life – including learning to fly a plane, scuba diving, the application process to become an astronaut, and her education as a physicist.
A real strength of the book is De Rham’s depiction of physicists as a collective group. She talks about scientists who got stuff wrong. She talks about scientific collaborations that were all the more fruitful for working together. She names all of the people she has worked with and what they helped her learn. You get a real sense of the amount of work and number of people involved to allow us to understand gravity as we do today. This is a realistic portrayal of physics being about asking questions, getting it wrong, working and learning together which contradicts the lone genius in front of a blackboard narrative.
As someone who has dabbled in physics but is really a mathematician, I found De Rham’s explanations a great way to consolidate the bits of physics – such as gravitational waves – that I was aware of but couldn’t actually tell you what they are. There is some assumed knowledge, but if De Rham were to explain Einstein’s special relativity from first principles it would be a much longer book. As such, I would recommend this book to anyone who has studied physics to about the age of 16.
Overall, this is a fascinating read, providing you with a better understanding of our universe.