Visual Effects
Length contraction refers to measurements of position made at simultaneous times according to a coordinate system. This could naively lead to a thinking that if one could take a picture of a fast moving object, that the image would show the object contracted in the direction of motion. However, it is important to realize that such visual effects are completely different measurements, as such a photograph is taken from a distance, while length contraction can only directly be measured at the exact location of the object's endpoints. In 1959 Roger Penrose and James Terrell published papers demonstrating that length contraction instead actually shows up as elongation or even a rotation in a photographic image. This kind of visual rotation effect is called Penrose-Terrell rotation.
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