Convinced that he hadn’t been going too fast, Roberts decided to contest the ticket. He had been pulled over by the squad car near the point at which he had come onto the George Washington Parkway after a full stop, and his contention was that in that short distance he could not possibly have accelerated his Volkswagen Beetle to the speed alleged by the officer. Roberts went back to the scene and carefully measured off the distances. He gathered data on the engine output and weight of his VW bug, factored in Newton’s law of inertia and made a few other calculations, and was prepared to go
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