Yesterday I went to court to testify as an expert witness in a criminal assault case; I was hired as an expert in mathematics and elementary physics.

In a nutshell, the defendant was accused of hitting another man with a large - ~3 lb. - padlock. In testimony late last Friday, the victim's girlfriend said that she had seen the defendant throw the lock away after the fight had ended. The police found it lying about 8' - 10' away on the sleeve of a denim jacket that the victim had worn. My job was to testify about how extremely improbable it would be to throw a lock of that weight that distance and have it land in that small an area without any evidence from the jacket; e.g., the sleeve bunching up on the far side of the padlock.

So I got to sit there and talk about sines and cosines and coefficients of friction (Expert: "We call that 'mu'." Court reporter: "MEW?" Expert: "M-U. It's a letter in the Greek alphabet.) and acceleration due to gravity and stopping distances and so on. Twice the judge had to tell the defense attorney (who has a Ph.D. in engineering) to stop testifying, that he had to ask a question and let his expert answer it.

Apart from the fact that I will be getting somewhere between $200 and $500 for a total of about an hour in court (plus dinner the night before), I have now been accepted by a court of competent jurisdiction as an expert in mathematics and physics. This means that I can advertise my services as a expert witness and other courts will more readily allow my testimony. Inasmuch as I would like to get involved in, for example, patent dispute cases where the value of a patent is important - and that value is generally determined using a mathematical model involving discounted cash flows and Monte Carlo simulation and such - this is a fortunate, if serendipitous, event.

 

Two Things:


1) Does the turbo whistle add power??

2) If you are in a van going the speed of light.. and you turn the headlights on... what happens??

 

Can you explain Markov/Hidden Markov Models to me? I'm in class for that now (as in RIGHT NOW...crazy professor is talking about 10 levels over everyone's heads).

 

I'd really like to know that too.

 

No.

Nothing interesting.

Please PM me your name and address so the I can put my invoice for $500 in the mail to you.

See above.

Please PM me your name and address as well.

 

I thought consultants were paid better than witnesses.

 

In this case, the witness is a consultant.

 

By the way, congratulations.

I trust that you're an expert in physics, not "physics" (ie, psychics).

 

Congrats, it's really a step in life when you have an independant group of people recognize you as being knowledgable within your field. The only draw back to this is the role that you are asked to play. Often times being an expert witness in a case can involve extensive writing and literature review to support the topic which you were asked to cover. Thankfully it pays extremely well.

 

Thanks!