# Worries about the equivalence principle

I have a serious worry about the equivalence principle in general relativity. I have been learning general relativity from different sources (Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli, A First Course in General Relativity by Bernard Schutz, Gravitation by Misner et al., etc.). With the help of all these sources, I have been able to make my own construction of the general theory of relativity. Using the equivalence principle in the form given by Steven Weinberg in his book "Gravitation and Cosmology" I could motivate the use of a differentiable manifold to represent the spacetime and to justify that freely falling particles follow geodesics in spacetime.

The equivalence principle, in the form given by Steven Weinberg, says that:

At every spacetime point in an arbitrary gravitational field it is possible to choose a "locally inertial coordinate system" such that, within a sufficiently small region around the point in question, the laws of nature take the same form as in unaccelerated Cartesian coordinate systems in the absence of gravitation.

I didn't have any problem with this statement. As I said, I used it as the basis to construct my own understanding of general relativity. What worries me is that I recently found a statement in the book by Ohanian and Ruffini, "Gravitation and Spacetime" (2013), where they say the following:

Einstein’s statement has often been generalized to sweeping assertions about all laws of physics being the same in a laboratory freely falling in a gravitational field and in another laboratory far away from any field. Such generalizations are unwarranted because, as we have seen, even quite simple devices signal the presence of a true gravitational field by their sensitivity to tidal forces and therefore permit us to discriminate between a gravitational field and the pseudo-force field of acceleration... If the rotational degrees of freedom of the motion of masses are taken into consideration, then the equivalence fails.

Actually, thinking carefully, even in a freely falling coordinate system, the Christoffel symbols can vanish, and they represent the first derivatives of the metric. However, the second derivatives of the metric can not vanish, and they leave a "remainder" that makes it so that the Riemann tensor is different from zero. This causes the tidal forces to be different from zero in a freely falling coordinate system, even in a small spacetime region.

Steven Weinberg insists, however, that:

Although a freely falling particle appears to be at rest in a coordinate frame falling with the particle, a pair of freely falling particles will exhibit a relative motion that can reveal the presence of a gravitational field to an observer that falls with them. This is of course not a violation of the principle of equivalence because the effects of the right-hand side (of the Jacobi equation, or the geodesic-deviation equation) become negligible when the separation between particles is much less than the characteristic dimensions of the field.

However, in section $$1.8$$, Ohanian and Ruffini say the following:

If astronauts in orbit wish to detect the gravitational field of the Earth by measuring the tide produced by the Earth on a drop of water, they will find it desirable to use a very large drop of water... The height of the tide increases with the size of the drop. This suggests that if the astronauts have been ordered to confine their experiments to the interior of a sufficiently small spacecraft, then they will not be able to detect the tide or the gravitational field... However, even in the limit $$R\to 0$$, the tidal deformation remains. We see that there exist several methods for measuring the tidal field locally, in a small neighborhood of a given point...The limitations on the minimum size of the neighborhood needed to perform measurements of a given precision do not arise from any intrinsic properties of the gravitational field; rather, these limitations arise from the quantum nature of matter, which prevents us from constructing an apparatus of arbitrarily small size... Local experiments can distinguish between a reference frame in free fall in a gravitational field and a truly inertial reference frame placed far away from all gravitational fields.

On the other hand, in chapter $$16$$ of "Gravitation" by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, they say that:

There is no way, by experiments confined to an infinitesimally small region of spacetime to distinguish one local Lorentz frame in one region of spacetime from any other local Lorentz frame in the same or any other region.

This is something very similar to Weinberg's statement.

Weinberg says one thing, Ohanian arguments something completely opposite, and then Misner et. al. reinforce Weinberg, but my own deduction agrees with Ohanian. I am quite confused. How can I, then, construct my understanding of general relativity? Are all my motivations and deductions incorrect? Who's right? According to Ohanian, Schutz, Misner et. al., Weinberg, and even Carlo Rovelli are all wrong. I am confused and overwhelmed.

• The principle holds for an infinite massive plane. Standing on that plate is like being accelerated in empty space. Feb 13 at 2:15