ABSTRACT

A brilliant aid in understanding special relativity is the surveyors’ parable

introduced by Taylor and Wheeler [Taylor and Wheeler 63, Taylor and

Wheeler 92]. Suppose a town has daytime surveyors, who determine north

and east with a compass, and nighttime surveyors, who use the North Star.

These notions differ, of course, since magnetic north is not the direction to

the North Pole. Suppose, further, that both groups measure north/south

distances in miles and east/west distances in meters, with both being mea-

sured from the town center. How does one go about comparing the mea-

surements of the two groups?