There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which John de Lancie's nearly-omnipotent alien character "Q" is stripped of his powers and banished to the Enterprise as a human because fans of the show enjoyed the character and wanted to see more of him, and at one point, he finds himself assisting the engineering team in trying to solve some problem. Asked to suggest a solution, he flippantly offers "Change the gravitational constant of the universe," which leads to a bunch of additional techno-babble that ends up driving some more of the plot in ways that don't really matter for this post. What stuck in my mind from that episode, when I watched it back in college, was the offhand suggestion to change fundamental properties of physics, because of course that's nonsense.
It's kind of fun, though, to realize that this is, in fact, a thing that physicists can do, and in fact that there's a whole field of research devoted to changing properties of atoms in empty space. A recent paper from the Joint Quantum Institute provides a nice example of this, changing the ways that atoms in the space near a glass nanofiber emit light. Admittedly, this isn't related to gravity, but it does offer the next best thing: a connection to some of Einstein's most important contributions to physics.
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