Is length contraction really paradoxical?
Abstract
A thought experiment is proposed in which a moving conducting shuttle encounters a gap between two conducting rails connected at one end through a bulb and a source of steady voltage. A naive application of length contraction leads to contradictory results when the encounter is examined from the rail and the shuttle frames, viz., that the bulb should switch off in one frame but should keep glowing in the other. However the interaction between the shuttle and the gap is so arranged that it is possible to analyze the experiment quantitatively in both the Lorentz frames within the framework of elementary relativistic kinematics. It is shown that the results of such a calculation lead to an exact agreement between the observed effects in the two frames. The article includes an Appendix that contains a compact bibliography of several of the paradoxes in the theory of relativity.
- Publication:
-
American Journal of Physics
- Pub Date:
- October 1987
- DOI:
- 10.1119/1.14911
- Bibcode:
- 1987AmJPh..55..943S
- Keywords:
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- 03.30.+p;
- Special relativity