Free Fall - Free Fall in General Relativity

Free Fall in General Relativity

In GR, an object in free fall is subject to no force and is an inertial body moving along a geodesic. Far away from any sources of space time curvature, where spacetime is flat, Newtonian theory of free fall agrees with GR but otherwise the two disagree. The experimental observation that all objects in free fall accelerate at the same rate, as noted by Galileo and then ambodied in Newton's theory as the equality of gravitational and inertial masses, and later confirmed to high accuracy by modern forms of the Eötvös experiment, is the basis of the Equivalence Principle, from which basis Einstein's theory of general relativity initially took off.

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