On Mar 31, 2010, at 7:52 PM, Francis X Roarty wrote:
Am I correct in believing a near luminal basketball could pass
through the eye of a stationary needle?
No. The basketball appears to contract only in its axis of motion,
which in this case must be through the eye of the needle. This
effect, when applied to an electromagnetic field, is called
"pancaking" because the field flattens out like a pancake, becomes
more dense (intense) laterally vs axially. The basketball will
retain its apparent diameter from the point of view of the needle,
thus it will not fit through the hole if it would not fit
ordinarily. A viewer to the side but in the frame of the needle
would see a pancake (oblate spheroid) shaped object hitting the needle.
There once was a man name Fisk,
Whose thrust was exceedingly brisk,
So swift was his action,
The Fitzgerald contraction,
Shrunk his thing to a disk.
(Subsitute your one syllable word of choice for the cylinder referred
to as "thing" above.)
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
