Imagine you have a ladder and you have a garage.

You've never put the ladder in

the garage because the ladder is too long. You'd either have to open the front d
oor and let the end of the ladder hang out into your driveway, or the back door,
and let the other end of the ladder spill out into your back yard. One day, a f
riend of you says that he can put your ladder inside your garage, albeit briefly
. You see, as objects approach relativistic speeds, they undergo length contract
ion. So if you're sitting in your garage, and your friend - who's an old guy but
has a good set of legs - runs through, the ladder will appear to be shorter tha
n it is when it's standing still. If you have a garage door opener that closes b
oth doors simultaneously (and quickly), the ladder will fit inside.
You decide to test it out. You'll sit in the garage, and just as your friend run
s through, you will shut both doors at the same time. Then you'll open them back
up again at the same time, so he doesn't run into the door. This should allow y
ou to see if the ladder fits. You go through the experiment and, amazingly, the
ladder fits. When you meet up with your friend outside, he asks why you didn't c
lose both doors simultaneously. You tell him that you did, and he says you didn'
t. You were right, he says, the garage was way too short. The only reason why th
e ladder didn't crash into the doors is they didn't close at the same time. The
door to the back yard closed first, as he was approaching it. The ladder hung ou
t into the driveway. Just as he was going to crash into the back door, it opened
again. The ladder started moving out into the back yard, and just as it cleared
the door to the driveway, that door closed and then opened again. At no point,
your friend says, was the ladder completely in the garage with both doors closed
.
As it turns out, both of you had a completely different experience, due to both
length contraction and relative simultaneity. If you are standing equidistant fr
om two light bulbs connected to the same switch, and someone flips that switch,
you will see both light bulbs going on at the same time. Someone standing next t
o one light bulb, and far from the other, will see the one near them come on, an
d then, later, the other one come on. There's no way to say which one is first.
Nothing travels faster than light - not even door molecules. Which means that bo
th you and your friend were right. The doors did and did not close simultaneousl
y, and the ladder both did and did not fit in the garage.