Cocktail Party Physics: and the oscar goes to….
Best Depiction of Equivalence Principle: Inception.
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A quick recap: Acceleration is motion in which either an object’s speed or direction (that is, its velocity) changes. Mathematically, acceleration and gravity are equivalent, just like energy and mass. If you’re riding in the elevator and someone cuts the cable, you’ll go into free fall. It will feel as if you were weightless as you float inside the elevator. Since both you and the elevator are falling at the same rate, you won’t be able to feel gravity’s pull. So from your limited perspective, you might conclude (erroneously) that gravity had inexplicably disappeared. The reverse happens when you accelerate in a car: you feel a force pushing you into you seat. If you can feel gravity’s influence, you can conclude that he is accelerating. And that apparent weightlessness is what’s depicted in this amazing scene — set in an elevator, natch! — in Inception
Really, inception bothered me for the same reason. It seems to get the equivalence principle wrong. They get it right in going from the car level to the hotel level, but then why arn’t they weightless in all of the other levels as well?
Inception was great fun (analyzed in WIRED), starting with its spinning pseudosphere top.
Classical (one exception) and quantum gravitations postulate the Equivalence Principle (EP), that all bodies vacuum free fall identically. Einstein’s elevator is definitive. Physics has looked. No measurable observable violates the EP to more than 5×10^(-14) difference/average.
Some observables are not measurable. Whose shoes are more divergent, yours or mine? Vacuum has no geometric anisotropy toward massless photons, arxiv:0912.5057, 0905.1929, 0706.2031. Massed bodies remain unexamined, for that is chemistry. Gravitation acts upon mass.
Do opposite shoes vacuum free fall non-identically?
Metaphoric shoes. Do chemically and macroscopically identical, local inverse geometric parity atomic mass distributions vacuum free fall along divergent minimum action trajectories? Covariance versus reflection in space is not required by Special Relativity’s Poincaré group or General Relativity’s Einstein group. Do single crystals in enantiomorphic space groups falsify the EP?
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/erotor1.jpg
Two parity Eotvos experiments, opposed opposite hands of alpha-quartz or gama-glycine.
Somebody should look. The worst it can do is succeed (re teleparallel gravitation, Einstein et al., 1930). The greatest obstacle to understanding reality is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Reality is not a peer vote.