One of the most stupendous thought experiments in Physics was drawn up by

none other than Albert Einstein which included something so obvious in our
daily life, but drew outrageous (at that time) conclusions from it.

Einstein was intrigued by the fact that the two ways of measuring mass come
up with the same value, gravitational mass and intertial mass. The fact that
the two masses are the same is why Galileo found that all things fall to the
earth with the same acceleration.

Imagine if you are in a closed box on earth. You have a ball and everything,
and you find out that the things fall to the floor just as they should, at
g
g . But another person is there in a similar box, and he has the same
apparatus. But instead of being on earth, he is accelerating. At
g
g!
He finds out that the ball falls in the same way, and so do feathers (ignoring
air resistance. perhaps you are wearing a space suit?) The crux behind this is
that all motion is relative. So you can say that the ball is falling to the floor, or
the floor accelerates towards the ball at

g
g . And both are equally true for both situations. The floor moves up at the
same magnitude with which the earth moves up. He concluded "The laws of
physics are the same in an accelerated or gravitated frame" (I know, it's been
simplified)

Einstein imagined an elevator in free fall, with a person inside it. The person
would be weightless during free fall. And so would be another person, in outer
space in a similar elevator. This led to him thinking a counter-experiment,
which has been described above.

Einstein used this to formulate the equivalence principle that would be the
foundation of General Relativity. It states that ``there is no experiment a
person could conduct in a small volume of space that would distinguish
between a gravitational field and an equivalent uniform acceleration.

Now suppose someone ``at rest'' outside your elevator way out in space
shines a flashlight horizontally across the elevator you occupy toward the far
wall of the elevator. If your elevator is at rest, then you will see the beam of
light travel in a straight horizontal line. If your elevator is moving at a
constant velocity upward relative to the person outside, you will see the
beam of light travel in a straight-line path angled downward. The person
outside still sees the beam traveling in a horizontal direction. If the elevator
is accelerating upward, then the beam will follow a curved path downward
relative to you. But if the beam of light curves in the accelerating elevator,
then the equivalence principle says that the beam of light should also follow
a curved path in a gravitational field.

Like this:-

And wow, He inferred that gravity curves space-time, such that light bends in
a gravitational field, as it should in an accelerated frame.

Every time I look at this thought experiment, it amazes me beyond measure.