Alex McColgan

Instead, just like with time, you would start to see everything else contract in the direction of your acceleration.

There's some good maths that talks about why this is, but I won't get into that today.

as it's the consequences of length contraction I want to talk about, not so much its causes.

After all, we want to get to the part where we start seeing the future.

And for that, we are going to need a thought experiment.

This thought experiment is known as the Barn Pole Paradox, and it goes like this.

What happens if you try to fit a 40 meter pole inside a 20 meter barn?

Let's imagine the barn has a door on each side, which you can slide the pole through.

Now, obviously, normally this task would be difficult to do without bending or breaking the pole.

However, if we take advantage of special relativity, it is possible to do this.

All you have to do is fire the pole into one open door of the barn at near light speed, let's pretend for a moment that you can do that, and

Hey presto, as long as it's going fast enough, length contraction would occur, causing the length of the pole to diminish to our necessary 20m.

The pole would fit in the barn, for a tiny fraction of a second at least, before blasting out the other end.

Mission success.

It would even be possible, if you could do it fast enough, for you to close and then open both doors of the barn at once while the pole was still inside, proving once and for all that the pole was inside the barn completely for that nanosecond.

But what happens from the pole's perspective?

Remember what I said earlier.

Objects travelling at speed do not see length contraction occurring to them,

but rather everything else existing in the universe contracts in the direction of the object's travel.

So we hit a problem here.