Claudia de Rham on playing with gravity

June 17, 2025·28 min·2 clips

Claudia de Rham made it to the last 42 in ESA astronaut selection and was told she was needed — then a latent TB test result from Madagascar ended her candidacy.

Gravity arrives first as biography. Jim introduces Claudia as a scientist drawn to its deepest puzzles and, in her spare time, to anything that pushed against it: diving, flying, and the hope of becoming an astronaut. Then the episode tightens around the physics. Cambridge puts her in a cosmology moment shaped by extra dimensions and the discovery that cosmic expansion is accelerating. That still has a jolt to it. Claudia explains that the universe is not just expanding. It is speeding up, despite the gravitational pull physicists expected to slow it down. Jim keeps bringing the ideas back to ordinary three-dimensional life, including the possibility that extra dimensions could be too small to notice day to day. After the PhD, the scale shrinks again. At McGill, Claudia turns toward quantum physics and subatomic questions. She talks about learning by patchwork, where different viewpoints slowly add up to a usable picture of reality instead of one tidy answer. The personal story stays close to the equations. Jim brings in Andrew Tolley as both a research collaborator and Claudia's husband, then asks how two researchers kept a relationship going through short posts, travel, airports, and work that demanded real commitment. The ending is clean. Claudia says perseverance matters, with creativity beside it, and admits her stubbornness may have gone past sensible. Her mother's joke says plenty: if Claudia stood in the road, moving the traffic and the road might be easier than moving her. The portrait is warm without getting syrupy. Gravity is the theory she studies, and also the thing she keeps testing, pushing against, and coming back to.

As heard by us

A clear science biography about gravity, ambition, and the slow work of building a theory.

Claudia Duran's story keeps circling gravity, both as a subject of study and as something she keeps trying to get around. It starts with an astronaut dream, then moves through Imperial College London, a PhD in theoretical cosmology at Cambridge, and the questions that come with…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want gravity explained through one scientist’s career.

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