So should we image a fast moving object to look contracted in the direction of motion? Taken literally, Einstein's statement means just that. And this notion was in fact illustrated by the physicist George Gamov in his 1940 book “Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland” [2,3]. There he writes about a virtual world in which the speed of light is only 30 km/h, so that even a biker can move at nearly the speed of light. This biker sees the houses at the roadside allegedly as shown in figure 1, contracted in the direction of motion.
However, this picture is entirely wrong. It is wong because Gamov did not take the consequences of the finite speed of light into account. In everyday life we may to all intents and purposes pretend that the speed of light is infinite, since we are always concerned with much smaller velocities. But when a velocity close to the speed of light is involved, this is not justified any more. On the contrary, what we should see in this case would be substantially influenced by the fact that light propagates at a finite speed.