Although lengths and distances shrink in the direction of motion, for odd reasons, the distance from the traveler’s face to the end of his nose (i.e., the length of his nose) seems to suffer no change: “ An observer moving with the velocity, v, of the stick will discover, however, that in his frame of reference, the stick, at rest, still has the length Lo.” b. A stationary observer sees and measures that the traveler and his ruler are flatter when they move orthogonally with respect to his line of sight: “ the source of light and the mirror draw closer together when the system is moving lengthwise.” “ Let us consider a stick, which, at rest, has the length Lo, moving with respect to a stationary observer with the velocity v parallel to its length. The stationary observer will discover that, in his frame of reference, the stick has suffered a contraction.” “ When an object (with mass) is in motion, its measured length shrinks in the direction of its motion. If the object reaches the speed of light, its measured length shrinks to nothing. Only a person that is in a different frame of reference from the object would be able to detect the shrinking - as far as the object is concerned, in its frame of reference, its size remains the same."
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 09:25:27 +0000
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