>>>>>...
>>>>>>>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 ;-)
>>
>>On the other hand, if the spaceship shortens infinitely, then it probably never would reach the desination planet. Every time it seemed to be getting close, it would shorten and be just as far away as it always was. I'm assuming, of course, that it shortens from the front, but maybe it shortens from the back at the same time, in which case, I have no idea where it would be in relation to the planet at any given time (which time is dilating anyway).
>
>Hah! I started sending almost the exact same message to you then got to think of it in the middle, then rejected it. I thought, maybe it IS getting infinitely short BUT it's an infinitely short "dot" with coordinates by the planet. i.e. an object, although approaching infinite shortness (let's say it's become the width of a hyphen) can still move through space. As the fore end appproaches the destn, even if contracting, it can't contract any further back than its aft end, otherwise that would become like "negative contraction". >-S

But you forgot to apply Heisenberg's uncertainty principal.
"The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa."

Since you know you're approaching the speed of light, you can't know where you are, so how do you know you're nearing the planet at all? And of course, this doesn't even begin to invoke the concepts of the Chronosynclastic Infindibulum.