AST201H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Equivalence Principle, Strong Gravity, Escape Velocity

• School: UTSG
• Department: Astronomy & Astrophysics
• Course: AST201H1
• Professor: Bryan Gaensler

Document Summary

Makes it so that if you were acceleraing at the speed of gravity and in both situaions you"re standing, you can"t tell the diference. Moving at constant velocity away from all gravitaional pull thus also feels the same as being in free fall on earth. If we revise the example of you and jackie, with you passing jackie at a constant speed, to you actually acceleraing, the example brings up some quesions. You can tell who"s feeling a force and who isn"t, but you sill cannot tell who is the one actually moving given the equivalence principle. The equivalence principle states that no experiment can disinguish a gravitaional force from a corresponding acceleraion of the whole reference frame. If i am acceleraing and a light is shone into my rocket, then i would see the light bend in my reference frame. This means that, since acceleraion = gravity, that means gravity must bend light too.