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?