The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity

"This book explores the subject of gravity in a fresh way, taking the reader from Newton to the frontiers of gravitational physics.

Per Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime, and this is an excellent and robust framework for understanding gravity in many situations.

However, physicists nowadays also often understand gravity as the manifestation of a fundamental particle - the graviton - in the same way that we understand electromagnetism as the manifestation of the photon. And, in the very same way that we can "see" light, which is nothing other than an electromagnetic wave propagating through space and time, we can now "hear" gravity in the form of gravitational waves (waves in the very fabric of spacetime).

As we celebrate 6 years since the first direct detection of gravitational waves, the reality of these waves, predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity, is now unquestionab