If you are familiar with Einstein’s theories of Relativity, one proposed idea you will have stumbled across is length contraction.  Lorentz length contraction is the observed effect on a high-speed object where the length of the object in the direction of travel appears shortened from the vantage point of a stationary frame of reference.  The length contraction would only be “observable” when the test object is traveling with relativistic speeds.  This means that the object must be traveling comparably close to the speed of light relative to the reference frame where the observation or measurements are made. 

 For example, a contraction of only 1% requires a speed of over 14% that of light (see Fig. 1).  That is about 95 million miles per hour!  The length of the observed high velocity object is reduced in the direction of the velocity into the factor Ö(1-v²/c²).  Velocity is the product of the magnitude of an object’s speed and its direction of travel.  It should be easy to see that velocities much smaller than that of light, c, make this factor practically equal to ONE since c² is such a large number.  This is why we don’t notice the affects of relativity.  Simplifying the entire picture of the length contraction into this brief summary, however, can create a harmful misconception of relativity.  Before going into detail about the length contraction distortion, it is necessary to review some basics about relativity.

              Everyone remotely interested in relativity has heard about time dilation.  This is the bizarre occurrence of the rate of an extremely high velocity clock slowing down to a rate exactly equal to the length contraction factor mentioned above.  This “slowing down” of a clock can be tested with far greater accuracy than the length contraction.  The reason for this is the powerful accuracy of various atomic clocks we have today, and fast planes that can reach high rates of speed for extended periods of time.  Even though we don’t have planes that come even close to the speed of light, our clocks are accurate enough to detect the time dilation over longer time periods.  Time is also dilated near sources of gravitation as compared to reference frames farther away from the gravity source, or higher.  This second case can be accurately tested over very long periods of time where the lower clock ages slower than the higher clock.  In all our attempts to disprove time dilation over the past decades, we have only managed to more accurately verify these effects.  It is unfortunately not quite so easy to measure the length contraction.  For example, an object 1000 feet long traveling at 1000 miles per second would only be contracted about 3/16”.  It would be traveling so fast that such an accurate measurement would be extremely difficult.

                  Why does the moving clock slow down?  Does that mean our reference clock speeds up when viewed by instruments traveling with the high velocity clock?  Since there is no set reference frame, who’s clock is correct?  These are obvious questions that very few people accept the consequences of the answers to.