Clocks Within Each Ship in Bell Spaceship Paradox

[1977ub]

On a moving (relative to S) train, if 2 clocks are created at the center, and one is moved to the back and the other is moved to the front (I presume we can neglect acceleration here for moving the clocks), then observer in S finds the back clock to hit any given time before the front clock - it is "older", has ticked more since it was created. This is RoS not acceleration.

I think this is where I went wrong. I wasn't really getting that all the effects seen in orig frame S can be made sense of without caring about what train frame regards as simultaneous. So - the clocks are created together on the moving train and then moved to the two ends of the train. The one at the rear now appears to be older than the front for S, and indeed it is the velocity differential (for S) related to moving the clocks in the opposite directions, which becomes what S finds to be the clocks reading different times.

There's no "effect" other than what is accounted for by following the individual paths of the clocks.

 

[harrylin]

I think this is where I went wrong. I wasn't really getting that all the effects seen in orig frame S can be made sense of without caring about what train frame regards as simultaneous.

Great - that's very important insight! In many cases, jumping reference frames is more confusing than useful. It was however very useful for developing the theory.