http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/25011.aspx
"April 27: Dr. Kasey Wagoner, lecturer in physics, will discuss "Pole vaulters and Barns." In 1905 Albert Einstein put forth his earth-shaking theory of Special Relativity. Einstein's seemingly unremarkable assertion that the speed of light must be constant had many remarkable effects. Included in these effects are length contraction (moving objects are shorter than objects at rest) and time dilation (moving clocks tick slower than clocks at rest). Given such odd predictions it is easy to see how the theory of Special Relativity can lead to many paradoxes. In this lecture we will explore one such paradox, which concerns a pole vaulter who wants to store his pole in a barn shorter than his pole is long, and walk away with an explanation even Einstein could understand."

Any irony coming from Einsteinians is absolutely inappropriate. The long-pole-trapped-inside-short-barn absurdity (to use a mild word), a direct consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, and the almost complete silence that has surrounded it for a century, are just tragic symptoms of an irreversibly dying science:

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects."

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...barn_pole.html
"These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in the barn. (...) If it does not explode under the strain and it is sufficiently elastic it will come to rest and start to spring back to its natural shape but since it is too big for the barn the other end is now going to crash into the back door and the rod will be trapped IN A COMPRESSED STATE inside the barn."

http://www.quebecscience.qc.ca/Revolutions
Stéphane Durand: "Ainsi, une fusée de 100 m passant à toute vitesse dans un tunnel de 60 m pourrait être entièrement contenue dans ce tunnel pendant une fraction de seconde, durant laquelle il serait possible de fermer des portes aux deux bouts! La fusée est donc réellement plus courte.. Pourtant, il n'y a PAS DE COMPRESSION matérielle ou physique de l'engin.."

http://www.parabola.unsw.edu.au/vol3...ol35_no1_2.pdf
"Suppose you want to fit a 20m pole into a 10m barn. (...) Hence in both frames of reference, the pole fits inside the barn (and will presumably shatter when the doors are closed)."

Note that the long-pole-trapped-inside-short-barn assumption is indispensable if one wishes the Michelson-Morley experiment to confirm the constant speed of light and refute the variable speed of light predicted by Newton's emission theory of light. The thought:

"No an arbitrarily long object cannot be trapped inside an arbitrarily short container - this is absurd!"

....inevitably leads to the conclusion that the Michelson-Morley experiment unequivocally refuted the constant speed of light and confirmed the variable speed of light predicted by Newton's emission theory of light:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its.../dp/0486406768
Relativity and Its Roots, Banesh Hoffmann: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

Needless to say, the thought referred to above would never occur in ordinary Einsteinians' minds:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwe...hapter2.9.html
"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Pentcho Valev