Timeline for How does Newtonian gravity violate law of inertia?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
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| Oct 21, 2017 at 6:29 | comment | added | Chris♦ | @spatialdelusion Perfectly uniform? No. So close to uniform you can't tell the difference over a small area? Sure. It's not really relevant anyway- the point was to postulate an equivalence between gravity and acceleration locally- meaning in an arbitrarily small volume. This has profound significance: for instance, it implies that light rays bend in gravitational fields, and that clocks run slower on earth than in space: because both of these things are true in an accelerated reference frame in the absence of gravity. | |
| Oct 21, 2017 at 6:13 | comment | added | spatialdelusion | @cris thanks, but can uniform gravitation fields even exist practically? | |
| Oct 21, 2017 at 5:58 | comment | added | Chris♦ | @spatialdelusion Good question! The thought experiment assumes a uniform gravitational field. Either a gravitational field that is genuinely uniform, as would be produced by an infinite plane of uniform density, or else an "elevator" that is small enough that variations in acceleration are too small to measure. Effectively that "acceleration" and "gravity" are locally indistinguishable, not necessarily globally | |
| Oct 21, 2017 at 5:55 | comment | added | spatialdelusion | ok, but in a gravitation field of earth objects will fall towards one point which would not be the case in an accelerating frame, so how is it indistinguishable | |
| Oct 21, 2017 at 5:50 | history | answered | Chris♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |