The Principle of Equivalence and the Twin Paradox

No Heading The canonical twin paradox is explained by making a correct use of the principle of equivalence. The role of the principle of equivalence is to provide a physical agent i.e gravity which can supply the required extra aging to the rocket-bound sibling during its acceleration phase through a gravitational time-offset effect. We follow an approach where a novel variation on the twin paradox is used to connect gravity with the desynchronization in the clocks of two spatially distant, identically accelerated observers. It is shown that this approach removes certain drawbacks of an earlier effort which claims to exploit the equivalence principle in explaining the differential aging in the paradox. * Author to whom all correspondences should be made.