>>12777924A person standing in anelevatorwith a broken cable feels weightless as the enclosure falls freely toward Earth. The reason is that both he and the elevator accelerate downward at the same rate and so fall at exactly the same speed; hence, short of looking outside the elevator at his surroundings, he cannot determine that he is being pulled downward. In fact, there is no experiment he can do within a sealed falling elevator to determine that he is within a gravitational field. If he releases a ball from his hand, it will fall at the same rate, simply remaining where he releases it. And if he were to see the ball sink toward the floor, he could not tell if that was because he was at rest within a gravitational field that pulled the ball down or because a cable was yanking the elevator up so that its floor rose toward the ball.
Einstein expressed these ideas in his deceptively simple principle of equivalence, which is the basis of general relativity: on a local scale—meaning within a given system, without looking at other systems—it is impossible to distinguish between physical effects due to gravity and those due to acceleration.
In that case, continued Einstein’sGedankenexperiment, light must be affected by gravity. Imagine that the elevator has a hole bored straight through two opposite walls. When the elevator is at rest, a beam of light entering one hole travels in a straight line parallel to the floor and exits through the other hole. But if the elevator is accelerated upward, by the time the ray reaches the second hole, the opening has moved and is no longer aligned with the ray. As the passenger sees the light miss the second hole, he concludes that the ray has followed a curved path (in fact, a parabola).
If a light ray is bent in an accelerated system, then, according to the principle of equivalence, light should also be bent by gravity, contradicting the everyday expectation that light will travel in a straight line
