[anobjectivist]

Modern physics is a class I am taking in the fall, and I will know much more about this then, but centripedal acceleration != gravity acceleration when you consider objects that aren't just point particles. For example, I doubt that tidal forces could be re-created in a centrifuge, but if you come across someone who has done so, please let me know, because I would be interested in this information.

As for the experiment, I understand that it has to do with massive objects ( such as the earth ) dragging spacetime while the massive object rotates. I don't see how you could change the mass of a centrifuge to a particle observing it and then rotate it so that it drags space-time by any amount that could be measured on any apparatus that people can make.

What they are testing here is not the same.

[VadeRetro]

For example, I doubt that tidal forces could be re-created in a centrifuge, but if you come across someone who has done so, please let me know, because I would be interested in this information.

My uneducated guess would be that tidal forces are easily observed in a small centrifuge. That is, the forces would be unequal at different ends of an object which is large relative to the centrifuge. (Not all parts of the object are whirling at the same linear velocity.) In a sufficiently large centrifuge (that big space station in Kubrick's 2001), the tidal forces shrink to nothing for human-sized objects. I don't think the tidal forces matter regarding time dilation, though. The equivalence principle amounts to saying, "Gees are gees, however created." What happens in one case happens in all cases.