On Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:14:50 -0700IOW, Steven Vincent Johnson said
"the basketball would appear visually to look more and more like a
flattened pancake."
Steven,
My mistake in not limiting the question to only the dimension in the
direction of
Travel -spaceship crossing our line of vision horizontally gets reduced width
while crossing vertically gets shorter
But your reply really did get to the crux of my question. "the basketball would
appear visually to look more and more like a flattened pancake." You use the
terms "would appear visually" while some articles I have read that the distance
"really" changes - I understand "relative" such that the observer can't
normally be in the same inertial frame except in a collision which is why I
chose a stationary needle and a basketball coming directly at it to sidestep
the collision issue... so say I widen one dimension of the eye large enough for
the basketball but keep the other dimension just wide enough for the pancake to
slip through - assuming I got my orientation dead on to agree with the oncoming
basketball my question becomes IS LORENTZ contraction "real" or only a
"relative illusion" ? I set up the parameters in the one way that I could
imagine to avoid the "relative" cop out where as soon as the observer and
observed start to merge into a single inertial frame through the acceleration
or deceleration of one object to the other the anomaly is lost. The basketball
keeps it's near luminal speed as it passes through a very long eye of a
stationary needle. Much of my conjecture regarding f/h in a cavity has been
based on this contraction being "real" relative to the diminishing width of the
Casimir cavity. I don't believe the gas atoms have to move spatially relative
to the closing walls of the cavity if the cavity can break the isotropy
inversely to the cube of the distance based on the Casimir force.
Regards
Fran
