Paradoxes about this effect include one involving three ships held together by a thread, and one where a ladder is carried through a barn.
Poincaré  (pwann-kah-RAY)  stresses were introduced to explain this phenomenon. Lord Rayleigh failed to see birefringence in light passing through an anisotropic  (AN-iso-TROP-ik)  tube in a 1902 experiment aiming to disprove this effect. Paradoxes about this effect include one involving three ships held together by a thread, and one where a ladder is carried through a barn. This effect is visualized in Minkowski space as the difference between two sides of a right triangle. It explains why the "square root of one minus (*) v -squared over  c -squared" was the ratio of two distances in the MichelsonÂ–Morley experiment. That factor, gamma, shares its name with this effect's formulator. For 10 points, name this effect in special relativity in which objects moving near the speed of light appear to get shorter.
Poincaré  (pwann-kah-RAY)  stresses were introduced to explain this phenomenon.
 length contraction  [or  Lorentz contraction ; prompt on partial answer] 