I studied about this paradox and encountered some problems:
• What are the observations when both the front and the back door of the barn are closed?
•When both the doors are open.
•When the back door is closed but front door is open.
•And finally, the conclusion from this paradox.
In: Physics
This is the sort of paradox you get when you only half commit.
You shorten the pole you carry though the barn by treating it as an object within the theory of relativity.
You keep the barn as is by treating it as if it was an object obeying newtonian laws.
You can’t do that. You have to treat both hypothetical object as is they existed within the same theory. Otherwise you get nonsense.
You can’t say that you for example open the 2nd door and close the 1st one as soon as the pole reaches it.
That is pretending that you have a pole flying through your barn at near relativistic speeds, but that you can see and react and send commands at faster than light speeds.
“At the same time” is not a thing that exist when you are dealing with relativity. If your barn is 100m long than anything happening at one end can’t affect the other end before 100m /c time has passed.
For 100m that is about a third of a microsecond and we normally treat is as “at the same time”, but normally we also don’t deal with relativistic poles flying through barns.
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