A way to fight your traffic tickets. The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California.http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0162
In view of enormous, extremely surprising and completely unexpected public interest to this work, we have added an appendix answering the two most common questions.
It is widely known that an observer measuring the
speed of an object passing by, measures not its actual
linear velocity by the angular one. For example, if we
stay not far away from a railroad, watching a train ap-
proaching us from far away at a constant speed, we first
perceive the train not moving at all, when it is really far,
but when the train comes closer, it appears to us mov-
ing faster and faster, and when it actually passes us, its
visual speed is maximized.
This observation is the first building block of our proof
of innocence. To make this proof rigorous, we first con-
sider the relationship between the linear and angular
speeds of an object in the toy example where the ob-
ject moves at a constant linear speed. We then proceed
to analyzing a picture reflecting what really happened
in the considered case, that is, the case where the linear
speed of an object is not constant, but what is constant
instead is the deceleration and subsequent acceleration of
the object coming to a complete stop at a point located
closest to the observer on the object’s linear trajectory.
Finally, in the last section, we consider what happens
if at that critical moment the observer’s view is briefly
obstructed by another external object.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2422
The purpose of this article is to introduce the reader to the ROOT data analysis software package, and demonstrate how it may be used to complement one's accident reconstruction analyses.
