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
The train thought experiment is highlighting the fact that light acts funny at high speed. And it acts funny because of a specific property
You see, the observation of light is based on the stream of photons hitting your eye (or some other object). If the object is moving toward the observer, then the photons are hitting the observer faster and the waves of light are crashing at a higher speed. But functionally there is no difference between red light from a source moving away from us, white light from a source stationary, or blue light from a source moving towards us.
We observe the wave as moving the same speed, regardless of whether we are standing still or travelling at 100,000,000 meters per second. But that wave is stretched or compressed into a different color of form of light.
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