The Nature of the Puzzle of Relativity

A foot rule placed in the line of the Earth's motion would be shorter than a same foot rule placed at right angles. Of course, the shortening could never be detected by measurement because our measuring rods would share it. This point of view resembles nothing so much as the white knights planned to die my whiskers green and always used so large a fan that they could not be seen. The odd thing was that the plan worked well enough. Later on, when Einstein propounded his special theory of relativity in 1905, it was found that the theory was in a certain sense correct, but only in a certainsense. But I do not wish yet to set forth Einstein's solution of the puzzle