10 Facts About Equivalence principle

Something like the equivalence principle emerged in the early 17th century, when Galileo expressed experimentally that the acceleration of a test mass due to gravitation is independent of the amount of mass being accelerated.

Tests of the weak equivalence principle are those that verify the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass.

Currently envisioned tests of the weak equivalence principle are approaching a degree of sensitivity such that non-discovery of a violation would be just as profound a result as discovery of a violation.

Principle of relativity implies that the outcome of local experiments must be independent of the velocity of the apparatus, so the most important consequence of this Equivalence principle is the Copernican idea that dimensionless physical values such as the fine-structure constant and electron-to-proton mass ratio must not depend on where in space or time we measure them.

Schiff's conjecture suggests that the weak equivalence principle implies the Einstein equivalence principle, but it has not been proven.

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The Einstein equivalence principle has been criticized as imprecise, because there is no universally accepted way to distinguish gravitational from non-gravitational experiments .

Strong equivalence principle suggests the laws of gravitation are independent of velocity and location.

Strong equivalence principle suggests that gravity is entirely geometrical by nature and does not have any extra fields associated with it.

Strong equivalence principle can be tested by searching for a variation of Newton's gravitational constant G over the life of the universe, or equivalently, variation in the masses of the fundamental particles.

Dutch physicist and string theorist Erik Verlinde has generated a self-contained, logical derivation of the equivalence principle based on the starting assumption of a holographic universe.