lectures

The Secrets of Gravity: The Peter Lindsay Memorial Lecture 2025

Imperial College

June 11

LT200, City and Guilds Building

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Abstract: Gravity is the overarching miracle connecting everything we know and the reason the Universe itself can even exist and evolve. It elevates space and time from mere pieces of scenery into central actors in the unfolding drama of reality. It has been tested with impeccable agreement in the most challenging environments from the edges of black holes to the weakest strain of gravitational waves. Yet, at the core of all its successes, its most profound feature yet is that it predicts its own fall.

Join this journey as we push the limits of knowledge and navigate through the foundations of space and time, underpinning the origin and fate of our Universe and that of everything in it.

Bio: Claudia de Rham has held professor positions across the world and is now a Professor in the Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics at Imperial. Her research challenges our understanding of the laws of nature and that of gravity in pursuit of a more fundamental description of our Universe and the laws that govern it. Her work has provided new perspectives to understand the origin of the Universe, its accelerated expansion, and the fundamental nature of gravity.

An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is ranked among the most impactful researchers in fundamental physics of the past decade and her contributions to science have been recognised by numerous grants and awards, including the Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award, the Adams Prize for contributions to Mathematics and the Blavatnik Award. She’s the author of an Encyclopaedia of Cosmology with Imperial Professor Andrew J. Tolley and her first popular science bookThe Beauty of Falling – A Life in Pursuit of Gravity is being translated in over 10 languages so far.