How to teach special relativity
I have for long thought that if I had the opportunity to teach this subject, I would emphasize the continuity with earlier ideas. Usually it is the discontinuity which is stressed, the radical break with more primitive notions of space and time. Often the result is to destroy completely the confidence of the student in perfectly sound and useful concepts already acquired. If you doubt this, then you might try the experiment of confronting your students with the following situation. Three small spaceships, A, B, and C, drift freely in a region of space remote from other matter, without rotation and without relative motion, with B and C equidistant from A (Fig. 1) On reception of a signal from A the motors of B and C are ignited and they accelerate gently (Fig. 2) Let ships B and C be identical, and have identical acceleration programmes. Then (as reckoned by an observer in A) they will have at every moment the same velocity, and so remain displaced one from the other by a fixed distance. Suppose that a fragile thread is tied initially between projections from B and C (Fig. 3) If it is just long enough to span the required distance initially, then as the rockets speed up, it will become too short, because of its need to Fitzgerald contract, and must finally break. It must break when, at a sufficiently high velocity, the artificial prevention of the natural contraction imposes intolerable stress.