  A fifty-year old apparently paradoxical thought experiment involving two
accelerating spaceships and a thread hat connects them states that the thread
will break due to length contraction. This paradox still appears to be regarded
by some physicists as a proof that (i) only physical bodies, but not space,
undergo relativistic length contraction and (ii) a relativistically contracted
body experiences a stress. This note, dedicated to the one hundredth
anniversary of Hermann Minkowski's paper "Space and Time", shows that a proper
relativistic treatment of the paradox demonstrates that it is a manifestation
of a specific relativistic acceleration phenomenon, which does not have a
classical analog. This means that length contraction plays no role in the
resolution of the paradox. It is also shown that no stress is involved in the
length contraction effect.
