HELP! * GREY=local LOCAL HTML version of Foils prepared 15 March 1996

Foil 14 Equivalence Principle

From Master Foilset of Numerical Formulation and Solution of Collision 0f two Black Holes CPSP713 Case studies in Computational Science -- Spring Semester 1996. by Geoffrey C. Fox * Critical Information in IMAGE
Says that a uniform gravitational field is the same as constant acceleration
  • If you are in a room with no windows, there is no way for you to tell that you were on earth and subject to gravitational field as opposed to hypothesis that you were far from any field but accelerating at 9.8 meters/sec2
Alternatively, Equivalence Principle says that the gravitational mass (the mass m1 that appears in Newton's law of gravity)
  • F=Gm1m2/r122
is equal to inertial mass m1 appearing in Newton's law of motion
  • F=m1 x acceleration
In general relativity, the Equivalence Principle is built in

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