Ladder Paradox and Transmission of Force
What if the back door (the door the ladder exits out of) is closed permanently and does not open? Suppose that the door is so solid that the ladder will not penetrate it when it collides, so it must stop. Then, as in the scenario described above, in the frame of reference of the garage, there is a moment when the ladder is completely within the garage (i.e. the back of the ladder is inside the front door), before it collides with the back door and stops. However, from the frame of reference of the ladder, the ladder is too big to fit in the garage, so by the time it collides with the back door and stops, the back of the ladder still has not reached the front door. This seems to be a paradox. The question is, does the back of the ladder cross the front door or not?
The difficulty arises mostly from the assumption that the ladder is rigid (i.e. maintains the same shape). Ladders seem pretty rigid in everyday life. But being rigid requires that it can transfer force at infinite speed (i.e. when you push one end the other end must react immediately, otherwise the ladder will deform). This contradicts special relativity, which states that information can only travel at most the speed of light (which is too fast for us to notice in real life, but is significant in the ladder scenario). So objects cannot be perfectly rigid under special relativity.
In this case, by the time the front of the ladder collides with the back door, the back of the ladder does not know it yet, so it keeps moving forwards (and the ladder "compresses"). In both the frame of the garage and the inertial frame of the ladder, the back end keeps moving at the time of the collision, until at least the point where the back of the ladder comes into the light cone of the collision (i.e. a point where force moving backwards at the speed of light from the point of the collision will reach it). At this point the ladder is actually shorter than the original contracted length, so the back end is well inside the garage. Calculations in both frames of reference will show this to be the case.
What happens after the force reaches the back of the ladder (the "green" zone in the diagram) is not specified. Depending on the physics, the ladder could break into a million pieces; or, if it were sufficiently elastic, it could re-expand to its original length and push the back end out of the garage.
Read more about this topic: Ladder Paradox
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—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If an ox will not drink water, you cannot force its head down to drink.”
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