Peer Rejected

rejections > phil.OS > REJ:2026.08.13.0001

REJ:2026.08.13.0001phil.OS (Philosophy)PRJ-2026-0044Vol. 2, No. 8Status: Rejected

Nothing Is Ever Caught: A Turn-Rate Ceiling on Terrestrial Pursuit, 214,806 Reconstructed Chases, and the Reclassification of Capture as Cessation

Ottoline Frey1, R. E. Hale2, The Pursuit Standards Working Group3

1. Department of Philosophy, University of Kirkmaiden · 2. Kirkmaiden Locomotion Laboratory · 3. National Office for Pursuit Standards

Submitted and rejected August 13, 2026 · 6 pages · 3 figures · review duration: 24 minutes

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Abstract

You have never caught a dog that did not want to be caught. Nobody has, and we show that nobody can. How sharply a runner can turn is set by the grip under its feet, so the faster it goes the wider it must turn — and a police officer, a sheepdog and a cheetah all sit on the same curve. An evader who runs a circle at the speed where that curve peaks is turning as fast as the ground will allow anything to turn. A pursuer closing on it can therefore never swing its own heading round to match, and contact at a mismatched heading is a graze rather than a hold. We reconstructed 214,806 chases from body-worn video, working-dog trials, wildlife telemetry and instrumented games of tag. In every chase that ended in contact, the evader had stopped turning before the pursuer arrived, by a median of 1.9 s, without a single exception. We then ran the trial: evaders told to run a circle were caught in none of 602 attempts, against 550 of 602 told to run flat out. Doubling a pursuer’s top speed made matters worse, exactly as the bound requires. We do not report a capture rate, because we no longer believe capture is a thing that happens. Nothing has ever been caught. Some things have stopped.

keywords: pursuit-evasion · manoeuvre envelope · turn rate · terminal alignment · capture

Cite this rejection

@article{PRJ20260044,
  title   = {Nothing Is Ever Caught: A Turn-Rate Ceiling on Terrestrial Pursuit, 214,806 Reconstructed Chases, and the Reclassification of Capture as Cessation},
  author  = {Ottoline Frey and R. E. Hale and The Pursuit Standards Working Group},
  journal = {Peer Rejected},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {Rejected manuscript, PRJ-2026-0044},
  url     = {https://peerrejected.com/papers/nothing-is-ever-caught}
}

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