No, if an object is moving away from you in Minkowski space time, the time difference of light coming from the far side and from the near side doesn’t compensate the “contraction”—it actually increases the apparent contraction (assuming 3-d perception). For an object moving toward you, it counteracts as you say (and in fact makes the object appear (with our 3-d, but still light-based, camera) longer, just as it also appears to be sped up).
Also what you see when observing a perpendicular motion isn’t actually a rotation. Imagine a cube with opaque edges but otherwise transparent, running at high speed along tracks that are touching and aligned with the edges. The edges must remain touching and aligned with the tracks from any observer’s point of view. So it’s not a rotation but some kind of skew. A sphere will still look circular from a moving observer’s point of view though.
And I find “length contraction” a pretty misleading name. It’s a purely kinematic effect due to the geometry of spacetime, and no more of a “contraction” than the fact that the height of a pencil is less if it’s askew than if it’s upright.
Agreed. I would in fact go further, in that it’s not so much the effect of the geometry of spacetime, as an effect of how we choose to define a coordinate system on that geometry.
No, if an object is moving away from you in Minkowski space time, the time difference of light coming from the far side and from the near side doesn’t compensate the “contraction”—it actually increases the apparent contraction (assuming 3-d perception). For an object moving toward you, it counteracts as you say (and in fact makes the object appear (with our 3-d, but still light-based, camera) longer, just as it also appears to be sped up).
Also what you see when observing a perpendicular motion isn’t actually a rotation. Imagine a cube with opaque edges but otherwise transparent, running at high speed along tracks that are touching and aligned with the edges. The edges must remain touching and aligned with the tracks from any observer’s point of view. So it’s not a rotation but some kind of skew. A sphere will still look circular from a moving observer’s point of view though.
Agreed. I would in fact go further, in that it’s not so much the effect of the geometry of spacetime, as an effect of how we choose to define a coordinate system on that geometry.