How one physicist beat a traffic ticket

When physicist Dmitri Krioukov was given a $400 (around £247) penalty fine for driving through a stop sign, he came up with a rather intelligent way of proving his blamelessness.

Appearing at a court in California, Mr Krioukov presented a math paper entitled “The Proof of Innocence”. To give a rough idea of the document’s content, here are a couple of sentences:

“Therefore we can assume that the deceleration was close to maximum possible for a car, which is of the order of 10 m/s2 = 22:36 mph/s. We will thus use a0 = 10 m/s2. Substituting these values of a0, xp, and xf into Eq. (8) inverted for t.”

Mr Krioukov wrote four pages of equations, graphs, formulas and a bunch of other things which only very, very intelligent people would probably understand.

However, in a nutshell he wrote that his car (A Toyota Yaris) was obscured by another vehicle (A Subaru Outback). When the physicist approached the stop sign; he slowed down beside the Subaru, came to a full stop, looked for hazards, and then drove on through.

As the officer was parked 100ft away from the stop sign and therefore, had an obstructed view of the incident, he was guessing Mr Krioukov’s angular velocity instead of his linear velocity...apparently.

After hearing his argument, and presumably understanding it, the judge agreed with Mr Kroiukov’s findings and overturned the ticket. However, she claimed the physics paper had nothing to do with the verdict and was instead based on the officer’s position.

Either way, I’m betting Mr Kroiukov was quite pleased with the outcome.

Labels: California, Dmitri Krioukov, penalty fine, stop sign, Subaru Outback, Toyota Yaris