Concept
Bell's spaceship paradox is a thought experiment in special relativity. It was first described by E. Dewan and M. Beran in 1959 but became more widely known after John Stewart Bell elaborated the idea further in 1976. A delicate thread hangs between two spaceships headed in the same direction. They start accelerating simultaneously and equally as measured in the inertial frame S, thus having the same velocity at all times as viewed from S. Therefore, they are all subject to the same Lorentz contraction, so the entire assembly seems to be equally contracted in the S frame with respect to the length at the start. At first sight, it might appear that the thread will not break during acceleration. This argument, however, is incorrect as shown by Dewan and Beran, and later Bell. The distance between the spaceships does not undergo Lorentz contraction with respect to the distance at the start, because in S, it is effectively defined to remain the same, due to the equal and simultaneous acceleration of both spaceships in S. It also turns out that the rest length between the two has increased in the frames in which they are momentarily at rest (S′), because the accelerations of the spaceships are not simultaneous here due to relativity of simultaneity. The thread, on the other hand, being a physical object held together by electrostatic forces, maintains the same rest length. Thus, in frame S, it must be Lorentz contracted, which result can also be derived when the electromagnetic fields of bodies in motion are considered. So, calculations made in both frames show that the thread will break; in S′ due to the non-simultaneous acceleration and the increasing distance between the spaceships, and in S due to length contraction of the thread. In the following, the rest length or proper length of an object is its length measured in the object's rest frame. (This length corresponds to the proper distance between two events in the special case, when these events are measured simultaneously at the endpoints in the object's rest frame.
Christian Gruber, Harald Van Lintel
