Monday, April 16, 2012

Using Physics to Beat a Ticket

The next time your kid asks you, "When will I ever need this stuff?" about homework, tell them you can beat traffic ticket. =P  An article posted by ARS Technica stated that a San Diego physicist was able to avoid a ticket using physics to explain why he did not deserve the ticket.

The paper written by physicist Dmitri Krioukov is titled, The Proof of Innocence, and details why the officer mistakenly thought Krioukov had ran a stop sign.  The paper notes, "... we show that if a car stops at a stop sign, an observer, e.g., a police officer, located at a certain distance perpendicular to the car trajectory, must have an illusion that the car does not stop, if the following three conditions are satisfied: (1) The observer measures not the linear but angular speed of the car; (2) The car decelerates and subsequently accelerates relatively fast; and (3) There is a short-time obstruction of the observer's view of the car by an external object, e.g., another car, at the moment when both cars are near the stop sign."

So there you have it, a real world example of why it's important to stay in school. =)

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