jnhrtmn said:
I would almost say that length and time transforms just cancel each other's effect. 1.25x0.8=1.0
As others have noted, you would be wrong to say this.
Here is a Minkowski diagram illustrating what's going on. If you haven't come across Minkowski diagrams before, they are basically the same as displacement-versus-time graphs that you probably came across in school physics. We draw the time axis up the page and a position axis across the page, and we record the position of an object at each time and plot a line. The interesting thing about these diagrams in relativity is that we can take them fairly literally as maps of spacetime.
This diagram shows the circumstance I described above; a red observer is moving to the left (so his line gets further to the left as you go up the page) and a blue observer to the right (so the blue line slopes the other way). A ray of light is propagating to the right; I've marked the positions of seven wave crests in orange. Again, these lines slope to the right and, as is conventional, I've picked units so that the speed of light is 1 and hence the gradient of the light rays is 1.
Immediately we can see from the diagram that the blue line takes a lot longer to meet the wave crest after the one it meets at the origin than the red line does, just as I said before.
I said above that we take the diagram fairly literally as a map of spacetime. And just like a geographic map, we can draw more than one set of axes. A glance at the Lorentz transforms will show you that lines of constant ##t'## have slope ##1/v## and lines of constant ##x'## have slope of ##v## in the unprimed frame - so we can add the axes of the primed frame (blue's rest frame) to this diagram:
The primed frame axes are drawn in blue. Because the blue object is at rest at the origin in this frame the time axis is hidden behind it and you can only see the ##t'## numbers, but you can see the ##x'## axis as a fine blue line. You can also see the orange lines crossing the black axis at intervals of one unit and crossing the blue axis at intervals of two units, consistent with ##\sqrt{(c+v)/(c-v)}## for ##v=0.6c##.
The absolutely critical factor that you must understand is that the blue axis is not parallel to the black one. That means that "all of space at one time" means a completely different thing to the two frames - some parts of what the blue frame calls "now" are in the past of any given moment according to the black one and some parts in the future, and vice versa.
Failure to comprehend this fact, that "all of space at one time" for each frame is a completely different and non-parallel "slice" of spacetime, is the single biggest cause of failure to understand relativity.
We can add a few things to the diagram to illustrate time dilation and length contraction:
I've dropped a line from ##t'=2## on the blue axis to the black axis. It strikes at ##2\gamma=2.5##. The sloped blue dashed line is the path of an object moving at the same speed as the blue observer but some distance ahead of him. You can see that it passes through the blue axis' ##x'=2## position, so the blue frame would say it is 2 units ahead of the blue observer, and it passes through the black frame's ##x=1.6## position, so the black frame says it is only 1.6 units ahead of the blue observer. This is length contraction.
Note that there's no "mechanism" as such. It's just that the two frames are measuring different parts of spacetime and calling them both "length".
Finally, we can draw the same diagram using the blue frame's axes as the Cartesian ones:
Now the black frame axes aren't represented as orthogonal (they are still orthogonal in the Minkowski geometry sense, but that cannot be represented wholly accurately on a Euclidean plane) but the blue ones are. The blue dashed line is clearly at rest at ##x'=2##, and you can see that the wave crests are separated by 2 units - the wave is redshifted.
But the key point is that
nothing has happened to the wave. Just like length contraction and time dilation, the redshift is entirely a product of the blue frame using axes with a different slant to the ones the black frame uses. The measured frequency isn't a property of the wave - it's a property of the interaction between the wave and the frame we've chosen to analyse it in.