I'm just reading a book about gravity. An example it gives is a spaceship accelerating. A beam of light travelling at right angles to the direction of movement of the spaceship enters it via a small pinhole. The book states that the beam of light would appear to bend to an observer within the spaceship. Intuitively this makes sense - if the ship were travelling at $0.5\,c$, for example, and was $10\,m$ across (from the pinhole to the opposing wall) then I'd expect the light to hit the wall $5\,m$ further back down (assuming the ship is accelerating "up") from the pinhole - the wall would have moved 5m further in the time it takes the light beam to cross the interior to the opposing wall
I think I'm fundamentally misunderstanding though. The book states this is down to the acceleration of the ship and goes on to talk about how using equivalence the same bending would be a result of gravity. In my description above though, it's the velocity that causes the apparent bending, and the same would be visible if the ship was maintaining a constant $0.5\,c$. I suspect that if this were the case (constant $0.5\,c$) there would be no bending at all, but I'm not understanding why
Can anyone enlighten me?
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