From my interpretation of it, it seems to be just a quirk of how humans see things; namely that light from the thing being seen must hit a person’s eye(s).
Given this, it would make sense that M’ saw flash B first, since the light from B has to travel less distance to M”s eyes than the light from flash A (because M’ is traveling right at a high speed). While with M, the two flashes were equal distance from him *and* he was stationary, so the light from both flashes has the same distance to cover to meet his eyes, making it appear simultaneous.
Am I misunderstanding something?
In: Physics
Einstein made a wild claim and then used the thought experiment to explore that claim: what if the speed of light is the same for everyone, including those who are moving (i.e. a different frame of reference). *No, really, what if everyone in all frames* (no matter how fast they were moving relative to each other) *could measure the speed of light and it was exactly c (for everyone)*? The human part is only that the human is the observer in each frame of reference. This was at a time when the idea that the speed of light was constant had just come into vogue (earlier the speed of light was thought of similar to the speed of sound, based on the belief in the luminiferous aether).
The result of the thought experiment had some pretty insane implications (relativity, space-time dilation), but you had to accept them if you held to the belief that c is a real constant. In some ways it helped socialize the concept of relativity (which was really the first spooky science, where reality no longer matched human’s day to day experiences).
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