i studied somewhere that acceleration and gravity are equavalent .does acceleration produce ripples in space-time just like mass?
Fredrik
Aug21-08, 12:31 PM
No. The equivalence is not like that at all. I don't know how to explain it better than with this example: Suppose you have clocks on the floor and ceiling of a rocket that's doing Born rigid acceleration in flat spacetime. If you calculate the relative ticking rates of the clocks, the result you get is also going to be the relative ticking rates of clocks on the floor and ceiling of a room that's stationary in a homogeneous gravitational field.
So what the equivalence principle says is that you can do certain calculations involving acceleration in flat spacetime and interpret the result as predictions about curved spacetime (or vice versa, but that would usually be much more difficult).