Is it possible to drive fast enough not to get caught on the radar?

The easiest way out of a traffic ticket is to respect speed limits. But if you've ever found yourself thinking of driving too fast in front of a radar to see if you could make it unharmed, know you're not the only one who can imagine that kind of thing.

Four physics students at the University of Leicester, England, conducted a study and concluded that if a driver passed a radar too fast, he could make his license plate invisible to the cameras.

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But if you just read this and were happy to know that your idea made sense, here's the bad news: to get around the radar, the car would need to be over 191 million km / h so the camera couldn't capture the board image. And since this absurd number is 1/6 of the speed of light, no vehicle we know would be able to reach it.

But how does this happen?

Students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy came to these conclusions after making a series of calculations for the institution's annual completion work. The Doppler Effect - a physical phenomenon in which the frequencies of light or sound emanating from an object increase or decrease when it moves in the same or opposite direction of the observer - served as the basis for the study.

The best example of this effect in our daily lives is the sound of an ambulance siren. However, the phenomenon also occurs with light, causing a color change to occur when an object is moving rapidly away. The higher the speed, the greater the change in frequency.

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Theoretically, this means that it would be possible for the license plate light of a high-speed vehicle to change its frequency so that radar cameras could not identify it. It is noteworthy that to reach these conclusions students considered equipment that works in a color spectrum similar to the human eye and yellow license plates because they are more common in England.

“Our message to drivers is that it would make no sense to try to use this method to get rid of a speeding ticket, ” concludes Dr. Mervyn Roy, professor at the research institution.