When most folks get ticketed for running a stop sign, most people wind up writing the court a check. UC San Diego physicist
Dmitri Krioukov wrote a mathematical paper instead. Rather than throw
his fallible human opinion on the mercy of the court, Krioukov uses a
series of equations and graphs to prove that the accusing officer
confused his car's real space-time trajectory "for a trajectory of a
hypothetical object moving at approximately constant linear speed
without stopping at the stop sign." In other words, the officer was
wrong, but Krioukov stresses that it isn't the officer's fault. "This
mistake is fully justified," he writes, pointing to the math. "As a
result of this unfortunate coincidence, the O's perception of reality
did not properly reflect reality." And to think, you probably
never thought you'd use this kind of math in the
real world.
