 Quote by chrispegg
Yes, but hasn't all of physics changed from the spaceship's perspective? How, for instance, do all the atoms of a contracted star fit within such a short distance without collapsing into a black hole?
Does the astronaut have to teach her child a different kind of physics regarding the size of an electron orbit around a hydrogen atom, etc?
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Many laws of physics, such as the one that you hint at, are formulated for systems that are in rest; that allows for the simplest formulation. They should not be applied to moving systems, instead the moving system description must be transformed to that of a rest frame. This is to a lesser extent already the case in classical (Newtonian) mechanics: the orbits of planets in a moving solar system are not ellipses but spirals. And of course, this problem does not occur for the electron orbits of the spaceship's atoms.