FWIW, here's the establishment position of the solution posted by a member of this mb.
http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/sr.html A famous "paradox" is trying to park a relativistic car in a garage: From the point of view of the car, the garage has "Lorentz contracted", and the car will no longer fit. But from the point of view of the garage, the car is now shorter, and so will fit even better. The resolution of the paradox is that if the front end of the car stops simultaneously to the back end from one "reference frame", that will not be true in the other. If both ends do not stop at the same time, the car changes length. (This has often been observed nonrelativistically, for cars stopped by trees or other cars.) You'll notice the comment about the stretched car, which appears on Brent's plots. It always puzzled me how this was relevant to the solution, and as far I recall, Brent never commented on it. Nor do I understand the author's comment above about the stretched car and how it is relevant to solving the problem. Note how the author refers to "will not be true in the other" [frame], by which he means the car frame. How is this relevant even if true, given that the two frames result in opposite conclusions about whether the car fits? The reason I'm not satisfied with the state of the alleged solution to this problem, is because whereas there are two frames which give opposite results, but only one *real *car moving at a relativistic speed. How can one real car have two opposite solutions depending on the frame of an observer? AG For Jesse; please send a post which lists the issues you've raised, which you believe I haven't responded to. I'd also like an explanation of why you think simultaneous events in the garage frame which aren't simultaneous in the car frame, are necessary to get solutions which locally agree. That's what I thought you asserted, and if so, it makes no sense to me because the car frame in fact never matches the result in the garage frame. So how can you expect any local agreement between these frames. Maybe you could define "local agreement" so we can be sure we're on the same page here. Moreover, as far as I recall, Brent denied that any pair of simultaneous events in the garage frame, will *not* be simultaneous in the car frame. At some point in the discussion, I thought this is what he meant, but apparently I was mistaken. AG On Wednesday, December 4, 2024 at 2:06:41 PM UTC-7 Alan Grayson wrote: > In the case of a car whose rest length is greater than the length of the > garage, from pov of the garage, the car *will fit inside* if its speed is > sufficient fast due to length contraction of the car. But from the pov of > the moving car, the length of garage will contract, as close to zero as one > desires as its velocity approaches c, so the car *will NOT fit* *inside* > the garage. Someone posted a link to an article which claimed, without > proof, that this apparent contradiction can be resolved by the fact that > simultaneity is frame dependent. I don't see how disagreements of > simultaneity between frames solves this apparent paradox. AG -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/941ce92a-c3ca-48f2-a6cd-60b08cc2391bn%40googlegroups.com.
