Ewing speed limit sign ‘open to interpretation’
Honestly, this column from 2005 is one of my favorites of all time. The sign is still there, and it still cracks me up, every time. It’s on Federal City Road near Bunker Hill in Ewing.
Attention anyone driving through Ewing Township: If you know what’s good for you, keep your speeds realistic.
Because if you don’t, the entire space-time continuum will rip open and we’ll all get sucked into a black hole and die. Or you’ll become a time traveler. One or the other.
How do I know this? Just check out the sign over there on Federal City Road: “Entering Ewing Township,” it reads, “Realistic speed enforced.”
And that means?
“I have no clue,” said Ewing Police Chief Robert Coulton. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the posted speed limit.”
Coulton said the signs went up sometime in the 1960’s, when Calvin R. Steepy was the man in charge of the police force.
“He probably meant ‘We really enforce the speed limits’” Coulton said. “He did use funny terminology that can be open to conjecture.”
As a matter of fact, Coulton said at least one ticketed driver tried to use the sign during a court proceeding, telling the judge he was driving within what would be considered a “realistic” range.
(Note to any speeders out there: It didn’t work.)
“It’s like a ‘Drive Safely’ sign,” Coulton offers. “But yeah, the wording he used is somewhat open to interpretation.”
Especially if you take the sign at face value.
Because if you do, “realistic speed” means something completely different.
Consider: Nothing moves faster than the speed of light — 186,000 miles per second, in fact.
Thus, anything traveling faster than the speed light would certainly be considered “unrealistic,” and therefore legal in Ewing Township, although physically impossible in our known universe — hence, the ripping of the spacetime continuum, black holes, insta-death, time travel, etc. Right?
“Speed of light is the upper limit,” said Dr. Paul J. Steinhardt of the Princeton University Physics department. “And depending on the type of object and physical condition, there are different expectations for what’s a ‘realistic’ speed.”
OK. Let’s go with this for a moment.
“In a vacuum, we know what the speed of light is,” Steinhardt said. “But if you put the light in a dense matter, like a Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms, you can slow light down to such a degree that you can actually walk faster than the speed of light.”
Cool. So, Dr. Steinhardt, is there a way to figure out what a ‘realistic’ speed is in Ewing?
“If we view ‘less than the speed of light’ as being ‘realistic,’” Steinhardt said, “then I guess it comes down to how dense Ewing Township is.”
Heh-heh. He said ‘dense.’
All I know is I’m keeping a copy of this column with my insurance and registration. And with my time-travel gear. Just in case.