Relativity and Cosmology

    

Is Relativistic Length Contraction Consistent?

Authors: Lars F. Jensen

An important part of special relativity (SR) is length contraction. According to this theory, it is a coordinate-dependent and ‘symmetrical’ effect, such that two observers, moving relative to each other, both with their own measuring rod, can both rightly claim that the other observer’s measuring rod is contracted, even though the rest lengths of the rods are exactly the same. However, with the help of thought experiments, it can be shown that this cannot be true in the real world — and that SR predicts two fundamentally different length contractions.

Comments: 5 Pages. An error in the argumentation has been corrected, plus minor changes to the text.

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Submission history

[v1] 2025-01-10 19:32:25
[v2] 2025-03-21 21:14:28

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