Monday - April 16, 2012

Ticket Proof

Russian Academic Beats $400 Driving Ticket With Math And Physics



A UCSD physicist was able to argue his way out of a traffic ticket with a bit of audacity and four pages worth of complex mathematics.

Dmitri Krioukov, a senior research scientist at the University of California, San Diego, was issued a ticket for failing to completely stop at a stop sign. Rather than eat the $400 charge, Krioukov decided to fight, producing a four page paper entitled “The Proof of Innocence,” arguing that it was physically impossible for him to violate the law.

It worked.

“The judge was convinced, and the officer was convinced as well,” Krioukov told PhysicsCentral.

By emphasizing the difference between linear and angular velocity, Krioukov argued that what the police officer witnessed was actually an illusion inconsistent with reality. It’s the same reason why trains seem to move slowly when they’re far away but then speed up when they’re close—even when the actual velocity has remained constant.

“Therefore my argument in the court went as follows: that what he saw would be easily confused by the angle of speed of this hypothetical object that failed to stop at the stop sign. And therefore, what he saw did not properly reflect reality, which was completely different,” Krioukov told NBC San Diego.

Full proof paper here.



Good for Dr. Krioukov that he made it work, but I’m going to guess that both the judge and the cop were simply ... wait for it ... blinded by science.

I have no idea if a little back channel communication between the University head and the county Justice League went on, but I’m wondering if the word got put out to let this one slide. Because, while I’m certain that Dr. K meant well, this is the biggest example of Wise Ass College Kid behavior I’ve ever seen, regardless of how old the guy might be. But if he got to court and set up his chalkboard and then gave a good lecture and wasn’t completely patronizing, keeping his patience and answering any interjections in a way that Everyman could understand, then the judge probably gave him an “A” for effort and the entertainment value thereof, and let it go. Heaven knows, sitting on the bench in traffic court listening to the moronic BS coming from most offenders must be akin to some kind of punishment for a judge.


And I’m jealous. Really.

I hate to say it, but I had this basic idea more than two decades ago, and it didn’t work. Use math and science to beat the rap, because they are above the law and are irrefutable. Ok, my thesis was slightly different, based on harmonic damping. When you stop quickly, the nose of your car will dive a bit towards the ground and then rebound. If you actually come to a stop, no matter how firmly sprung and damped your vehicle is, the harmonic will repeat itself at least once to a lesser degree. Dive, Bounce, dip, bounce. If you fake the stop by jumping on the brakes and then stabbing the gas, the car goes Dive Bounce, lift. That’s physics, and unlike a traffic ticket you can’t beat it. And you can see it, you can see the difference from 50 yards away. Furthermore, my thesis is not hinged on a special point of observation or the special circumstances of something else momentarily getting in the observer’s way, as is Dr. K’s thesis.

Honestly, his math is great, but his entire proof can be jettisoned due to that one instance of obfuscation: the other vehicle that drove by between his stopping car the traffic cop was enough to seal the deal. Furthermore, California motor vehicle law is probably highly similar to New York motor vehicle law, and neither one specifies any minimum instance of time for a stop to occur in.

So now I’m waiting for the next academic, some expert in quantum mechanics, to blow through that stop sign at 90 mph and then argue that he did stop, because if you slice the time fine enough, motion between instants becomes smaller than humanly observable, and what the observers are basing their belief that no stopping occurred on is only the side effects of vehicular mechanics, not the actual stopping itself, or the lack thereof. Actually the time slice isn’t even all that fine, relatively speaking - and I really am speaking relatively. You can’t see a fluorescent light blinking, but it is actually turning itself on and off 60 times a second. The “flicker threshold” is half again faster than that, about 40 times a second. So if you stop for 1/40th second then go again, nobody can see it happen. And you don’t need to be a tree in the forest to prove it; it’s common science. Dr. K is using the same concept, he just isn’t stating it. A momentarily obstructed view is the same as a flicker or a blink.

So why did my case fail? It was back in my college days. I’d just dropped my girlfriend off at her dorm at about 3am, one winter night after another long hot date at my off campus apartment. I was the only car moving on campus. I pulled up next to the stop sign at the corner, right next to ULED (campus cops), just sitting there in their big cop SUV right up on the sidewalk. Same frame of reference as Dr. K., but much closer. I stopped, but only for a very short time, then turned right and drove towards the campus gate. Halfway there, on come the red lights and it’s ticket time. ULED tickets carry real cop weight in that town. I entered a plea of not guilty, and just to screw me over the town gives me a court date of a week after the semester ends. Ha ha, going to stick it to that college boy punk, make him stay over a week at his own expense, or at least re-do the onerous drive all the way up and back to college town just a few days after getting out of there. Well ha ha on them, I lived off campus all year round. And I was furious, and found solace in the halls of Hermes and the embrace of Urania.

So I got to the court, ready to make my case. And the cop lied his ass off. Not only did he put his vehicle on the other side of the intersection, he flat out stated that I didn’t even slow down, and took the corner like a maniac at high speed. So all my precious calculations were for shit, and I had to pay. There is not justice in traffic court. Almost never.


States would be smarter if they amended their laws to mandate the time that a minimum stop must be held for. Half a second seems fair. Long enough to say “potato”. A full second? Plenty sufficient in my opinion. Then me and Dr. K would both be guilty, and neither one of us would have had recourse to seek justice with a calculator and graph paper.

PS - $400 for a failure to stop? Holy cow. What, is California trying to balance their budget based on traffic ticket revenue? Excessive punishment much? Horry Clap!!

Posted by Drew458     on 04/16/2012 at 01:05 PM   
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