>>...
>>>>Consider this:
>>>>
>>>>A car approaches the speed of light and thus becomes close to infinitely long.
>>>>It arrives at its garage and, only having drum brakes, fails to slow down and stop, crashing into the back wall and stopping dead.
>>>
>>>I think you have it backward. AFAIK, the length decreases in the direction of motion rather than increases. The car would become infinitely short and infinitely massive. Forget about being stopped by some stinking brick wall.
>>
>>I think not. How could something aqpproach infinite shortness and yet also infinite mass? I may be wrong but that's how I learned it.
>
>The same way a car could approach the speed of light. Logically it sounds like you're right, but you can't really apply ordinary logic to to infinite systems. Length contracts, time dilates, and mass increases as the speed of light is approached.
>
>Check this

Hmmm. It would seem I've got it backwards. It's many years since I considered and played with the equations (in fact, so long ago that I had to keep jotting down nos from my calculator as it couldn't handle the big nos & didn't do EXP :-).

Thanks for that.

Actually I'd always thought that was a problem: if you were to get on a spaceship travelling to a distant planet, as you approached the SOL, and tended -> infinite length, the ship would be passing the planet before it got there. So there wouldn't be any point going there, you mi's weel just get up to SOL locally, and jump off as the door gets near the planet, as the ship stretches. That clears up that paradox :-)

Strange. The garage conundrum was posed to me (if I'm remembering it right) by a talented mathmetician friend some 20-odd years ago. So he put me off track I guess ;-)