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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