Free-Fall, Weightlessness, and Geodesics

Article 48968 introduced the geometry of spacetime, which defines proper duration and proper length for timelike and spacelike worldlines, respectively. This article shows how to determine which worldlines are geodesics. A timelike geodesic describes the journey of an object in free-fall.

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Revision history

2024-02-25 (fixed incorrect grammar: "whether or not" -> "whether" when the outcome is in question)
2022-10-23 (updated bibliography to include publication data instead of only arxiv link)
2022-06-11 (updated references to other articles in this series to link to html abstract pages instead of to pdfs. Didn't change the version number/date)
2022-02-05 (added new cross-references, fixed a sign error in the equation for the coefficients of the general geodesic equation, fixed pdf metadata)
2022-01-16 (first version)

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updated 2024-12-14

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Free-Fall, Weightlessness, and Geodesics

Revision history