World Science Scholars

34.4 The Pole in the Barn: Spacetime Diagrams - Bart's Skateboard

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    • What do you think will happen in this version of the Pole in the Barn Paradox? Bart is riding a skateboard whose rest length (between the front and back wheels) is 1 meter at a velocity so high that those on the sidewalk say his skateboard is contracted to a hundredth his rest length, 1 centimeter. Directly on his path is a sewer drainage cover, embedded in the road, with gratings that are 10 centimeters apart. Observers on the sidewalk think he’s going to fall in. But from Bart’s view, his skateboard is still 1 meter long and it is the separations in the drainage cover that are Lorentz contracted down to .1 centimeters apart, so he can simply skate right across them. What happens?

    • Bart will simply ride on it

    • Bart will ride like a champ.

    • Bart will skate across them.

    • Bart will not fall he will cross it

    • The sidewalk viewers will post process to understand that at Barts velocity the gratings, from his point of view, will be Lorentz contracted to .1cm and, even at only 1cm long he will ride his scateboard across the drain with style 🙂

    • According to him, he would ride over the grate

    • I can say for sure that Bart will ride over it but I don’t know what is the reason behind this. If I take a guess then it would be as follows,” The force which will pull Bart has something to do with mass and I think at some place the famous formula E=mc^2 will come into picture”.

    • Bart crosses over. He sees that from his perspective, and observers at the cover may see it differently, but they can calculate how his measurement given the different time clocks on the front and rear of his skate board, would allow him to cross.

    • He would cross it no problem.

    • I’d say he skates across the gratings because from the perspective of a skateboard the gap is small enough. The observers on the sidewalk, however, will see something quite strange as if Bart was floating for some time over the gap, but they can figure out why he does not fall just as team barn figured out why team pole thinks that the pole does not fit into a barn.

    • No genuine physical contraction takes place.

    • What does Bart call his board? Growing up near a nuke plant, Bart and his cohort have a SRT place in the heart.

      Board length= 1 m (huge)
      Final Lorentz contraction length of the board of Barticus= 1 cm
      Sewer gratings set apart by= 10 cm

      ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆
      ∆ 10 cm ∆ 10 cm ∆ 10 cm ∆ ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆
      ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆

      The Barticus view is of no board contraction = 1 m length

      Drainage cover separations=. 1 cm= 1 mm apart

      No Toontown gear, reckless atomic-like (spacelike, timelike, lightlike parallel?) bouncing around, thinking to skate over the drainage gratings in his cartoonical, angled, exuberance.

      ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆
      ∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆eyeswim∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆∆

      The pole in the barn becomes the board over the grating.

      SRT applies Lorentz transformations to the motion of Barticus.

      Spacetime Minkowski diagrams allow for the board of Barticus to achieve a 1 cm length.

      1 cm will fall into openings of 10 cm.

      According to the world of Bart, the Lorenz contractions of the non- moving grate make them. 1 cm, or 1 mm apart.

      It belng toontown, Bart achieves his perspective and flies over the gratings.

      As toontown god, Bart has the final say. He froglike (new spacelike, timelike, lightlike invariable?) water pucklike (?) skips from gratetop to grate top at now minisize to hop-skip-and-jumplike way over the like grate from hell. Grody to the maxlike. His only toon grace is to leapfroglike. This is not taken into account by non-electronic biologicals. On this equation. Without great leaps only available toontownishly, he visits the underworld, the alien bases there and becomes premium, held hostage til his majestic toion wife saves him.

      In our non- electronic version we must not talk of, Bart falls into the grateworks now too small for him. If he would slow his heavenly speed, the board would grow and be of greater length than death by gratings.

      But we are in Barts world, on the edge of SRT. Can there be moon applications for this with Jupiter Icy Moon robots evading 80 moons?

      I will be wrong, but can imagine the feat, an strange inverse of the Pole in barn scenario.he should visit the underworld.

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    • at those speeds a little gap in the road wouldn’t bother anything anyway. but the math says he will have no gap to skip.

    • The scenario you’ve described is a variation of the “Pole in the Barn Paradox,” which is a relativistic thought experiment often used to illustrate the effects of length contraction in special relativity. In this version of the paradox, you’ve replaced the pole with Bart on a skateboard and the barn with a sewer drainage cover. Let’s break down what happens according to both the observers on the sidewalk and Bart on the skateboard:

      Observers on the Sidewalk (Rest Frame):
      From the perspective of the observers on the sidewalk, Bart’s skateboard is contracted in the direction of motion due to his high velocity. They perceive the skateboard’s rest length to be 1 centimeter and the separations in the drainage cover to be 10 centimeters apart. Since the gratings on the drainage cover are far apart compared to the contracted length of Bart’s skateboard, it appears that Bart’s skateboard won’t fit between the gratings. Thus, they predict that Bart will not be able to skate across the drainage cover without hitting the gratings.

      Bart on the Skateboard (Moving Frame):
      From Bart’s perspective on the skateboard, he sees his skateboard as having its original rest length of 1 meter, and it’s the separations in the drainage cover that are contracted to 0.1 centimeters apart. This means that Bart’s skateboard is significantly longer than the gaps between the gratings. As a result, Bart believes that he can easily skate across the drainage cover without any issues.

      In this paradox, there’s a contradiction between the two perspectives due to the relativistic effects of length contraction. However, the paradox can be resolved by considering the relativity of simultaneity. Events that appear simultaneous in one frame of reference might not be simultaneous in another frame due to time dilation effects. As Bart approaches the drainage cover, the way he perceives the gaps between the gratings and the way the observers on the sidewalk perceive them differ due to their relative velocities.

      In the end, according to the principles of special relativity, Bart should be able to skate across the drainage cover without hitting the gratings, even though observers on the sidewalk might think he will. The apparent contradiction arises from not fully accounting for the relativity of simultaneity and the effects of length contraction.

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