Related papers: Falling Bodies: the Obvious,the Subtle, and the Wr…
After providing an extensive overview of the conceptual elements -- such as Einstein's `hole argument' -- that underpin Penrose's proposal for gravitationally induced quantum state reduction, the proposal is constructively criticised.…
The assumed universality of the equivalence principle suggests that a particle in a gravitational field has identical physics to one in an accelerated frame. Yet, energy considerations prohibit radiation from a static particle in a…
According to Aristotle "time is the number of change with respect to the before and after". That's certainly a vague concept, but at the same time it's both simple and satisfying from a philosophical point of view: things do not change…
We review the experimental evidence for Einstein's special and general relativity. A variety of high precision null experiments verify the weak equivalence principle and local Lorentz invariance, while gravitational redshift and other clock…
We demonstrate that a de Broglie wave of a particle in a gravitational field turns towards the region of a smaller gravitational potential, causing the particle to fall. This turning is caused by clocks running slower in the smaller…
When a small, uncharged, compact object is immersed in an external background spacetime, at zeroth order in its mass it moves as a test particle in the background. At linear order, its own gravitational field alters the geometry around it,…
That gravitation can be understood as purely metric phenomenon depends crucially on the validity of a number of hypotheses which are summarised by the Einstein Equivalence Principle, the least well tested part of which being the…
The principal subject of this thesis is the gravitational two-body problem in the extreme-mass-ratio regime---that is, where one mass is significantly smaller than the other---in the full context of our contemporary theory of gravity,…
Theory of general relativity (GR) has been scrutinized by experts for almost a century and describes accurately all gravitational phenomena ranging from the solar system to the universe. However, this success is achieved provided one admits…
In the general relativistic description of gravitation, geometry replaces the concept of force. This is possible because of the universal character of free fall, and would break down in its absence. On the other hand, the teleparallel…
Recently, we have started to investigate behavior of a composite quantum body in an external gravitational field in the framework of General Relativity [see, for a review, A. G. Lebed, Mod. Phys. Lett. A, {\bf 35}, 2030010 (2020)]. As the…
We point out that the universality of free-fall can be tested by observing surface-gravity changes of the Earth. The Earth's inner core is weakly coupled to the rest part of the Earth by mainly gravitational forces. If there were a…
Possibilities emerging out of the dynamical evolutions of collapsing systems are addressed in this thesis through analytical investigations of the highly non-linear Einstein Field Equations. Studies of exact solutions and their properties,…
This work places the invariant $ds^2$ at the center of the gravitational interaction, interpreting it not as a purely geometric object but as the differential of proper time, endowed with direct physical meaning. Starting from the extension…
A new gauge theory of gravity is presented. The theory is constructed in a flat background spacetime and employs gauge fields to ensure that all relations between physical quantities are independent of the positions and orientations of the…
The basic idea that gravity can be a long-wavelength effect {\it induced} by the peculiar ground state of an underlying quantum field theory leads to consider the implications of spontaneous symmetry breaking through an elementary scalar…
Free fall has signed the greatest markings in the history of physics through the leaning Pisa tower, the Cambridge apple tree and the Einstein lift. The perspectives offered by the capture of stars by supermassive black holes are to be…
The equivalence principle of gravity is examined at the quantum level using the diffraction in time of matter waves in two ways. First, we consider a quasi-monochromatic beam of particles incident on a shutter which is removed at time $t =…
The universality of free fall is one of the most cherished principles in classical gravity. Its fate in the quantum world is one of the key questions in fundamental physics. We investigate the universality of free fall in the context of…
Already in the 1970s there where attempts to present a set of ground rules, sometimes referred to as a theory of gravitation theories, which theories of gravity should satisfy in order to be considered viable in principle and, therefore,…