My guest today has quite an unusual relationship with gravity.
While she 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 Canadian waterfalls.
Her ultimate dream was to escape gravity's clutches altogether and become an astronaut,
a dream that was snatched away by an unlikely twist of fate.
But Claudia Duran has no regrets.
I've had to defy gravity for most of my life, she says, in an effort to understand it.
As professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London,
she now grapples with deep mathematics,
where the fields of particle physics, gravity and cosmology meet,
on a quest to understand how the universe really works.
She's a pioneer in a subject called massive gravity.
which might take us beyond even Einstein's theory of relativity and shed light on why the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.
Claudia Duran, welcome to The Life Scientific.
Hi, James.
Very good to be here.
Now, here on Earth, we all experience gravity every day and we can't escape its clutches.
So what is this mysterious thing we call gravity?
That's one of the most profound questions there is.