A possible way to keep cats from falling.

[gcrider]

Dear Cecil,

I read your column about how cats seem to always land on their legs and then remembered another rumor that whenever a piece of bread falls it always lands buttered side down. I got to thinking that if we were to attach a piece of bread, buttered side up, onto the back of a cat, the cat would never touch the ground after being tossed out of a window. I'm about to go try this on my roommates' cat and will follow this message up with a report on the outcome. Wish me luck, because if I'm right, and this succeeds, I will not only have found a way to save all of those cats who keep plummeting to their death but possibly a new design application for hovercrafts.

Very seriously,

Glenn "straightjacket" Crider

[Arnold Winkelried]

Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.

Please include a link to Cecil's column if it's on the straight dope web site. To include a link, it can be as simple as including the web page location in your post (make sure there is a space before and after the text of the URL).

Cecil's column can be found on-line at this link:
Do cats always land unharmed on their feet, no matter how far they fall? (19-Jul-1996)

__________________
moderator, «Comments on Cecil's Columns»

[Arnold Winkelried]

gcrider, the current consensus in the scientific community on the subject is that, in the case of buttered toast, the operating principle is the presence of butter determining the orientation of the object during the fall, with the toast being merely a repository for the butter.
Therefore, one could theoretically achieve perpetual motion simply by buttering the back of the cat and dropping the feline.

P.S. Scientific American once had an article on the subject. The author speculated that for buttered toast, a piece of toast is just the right shape/size for turning over once when dropped from table height, which would explain the fact that it most often lands butter-side down.

[Chronos]

The whole hovercat thing is a prime example of bad science. We start with two premises: A cat always lands on its feet, and toast always lands butter side down. If the cat-toast combination doesn't land, this violates both original premises: If a cat doesn't land, then it doesn't land on its feet, and if the toast doesn't land, then it doesn't land butter side down. What we need is a system whereby both cat and toast do, in fact, land, and in the required orientation. The obvious possibility that presents itself is that the cat lands on its feet, and then immediately proceeds to roll over onto its back, thereby smearing butter on the linoleum.

[Arnold Winkelried]

Chronos - it's spoilsports like you who are the main reason that I'm not commuting to work in a flying car. When Leonardo da Vinci drew a helicopter, I'm sure everyone laughed at him.

When my buttered cat experiment makes the front page of the NY Times, you'll eat your words.

[Billdo]

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!

Unfortunately, the latest developments in super-string theory show that if you drop a buttered-bread-backed cat the space-time continuum will warp so that the feline-toast unit will land so that both sides will land on the floor simultaneously.

Of course, if you use Schroedinger's cat for this experiment, there's only a 50% chance of this happening.

[OxyMoron]

Billdo, wait a sec. Schroedinger's cat is in a box, right? I mean, it's hard enough to attach toast to a cat when you know that the cat's alive and kicking (and scratching), but when there's only a 50% chance then the complications multiply, no? Plus, if you think about it (and that's probably not a wholesome activity, but anyway), the box would have to be very large indeed, since otherwise you wouldn't be testing the aerodynomic properties of buttered toast and cats, but of buttered toast and Schroedinger boxes, which rather defeats the purpose. So you attach the toast to the cat, put the cat on a remote-controlled diving board (or maybe a dunking seat?) inside a giant box, to which one attaches an equally giant vial of prussic acid with valve controlled by quantum activity. You press a button, the toast-cat-torpedo goes merrily flying, all the while at the quantum level the cat is alive or not alive, but of course if the cat isn't alive then the only way it can land on its feet is, well, coincidence.

Oh lordy, help me out of this!

[Achernar]

Well what if the cat lands on its feet, but the toast tunnels through the cat, and undergoes a parity reversal? Then it'd still land butter-side down.

Another question. It's commonly believed that a cat with nothing on its back lands feet first. Where do people get off extending this to cats with cargo? And would it apply to a cat with, say, a refrigerator on its back?

[RiverRunner]

Variation on the theme: What about strapping two cats together back-to-back, making the "beast with two fronts," as it were.


The battle has been joined, you see,
twixt gravity, felinity;
it is with some felicity
I gaze upon infinity.

If gravity can't claim these kitties,
perhaps we can have floating cities.


RR

[wolfman]

You press a button, the toast-cat-torpedo goes merrily flying, all the while at the quantum level the cat is alive or not alive, but of course if the cat isn't alive then the only way it can land on its feet is, well, coincidence.

Come on now, by distiling the nature of the the cat to a state of alive or dead, you are clearly ignoring the well established fact that a cat has nine lives, or more specifically 9 concrete states of aliveness(J.Hanna, W. Barbera Tom v. Jerry 1960-1980). By attempting to reduce the quality of aliveness of the cat to a single discrete state you are showing ignorance of the very matter being discussed.

[OxyMoron]

Well now, you've got me to thinking, and lo and behold I've got my handy-dandy copy of The Elegant Universe nearby. Now, we know from Universe that there are probably a total of (drumroll please)

nine spatial dimensions!


Coincidence? Of course not. Moreover, it turns out that six of them are...curled up! Now what is it that cats do more than anything excepting, perhaps, hedgehogs and armadillos? Of course! So here we have the explanations for the nine lives - three of them are curled up in the "extended" dimensions we can see, and the other six are curled up in the curled-up dimensions we can't see.

Now, the small problem is that all of the lives are taking place concurrently, so all nine are going through the air after we push our hypothetical button. At least we have a start, though, and I must thank my esteemed colleague Wolfman.

Oh, and of course there's that pesky tenth dimension, or time, but I don't think that need detain us for the moment....

[wolfman]

Hmm, I think we may be on to something here. He have already proven that the buttered-cat will not land, but instead will float. Well since the cat exists in all dimensions simultaneously, it follows that the buttered cat must 'float without landing' in all dimensions. In other words, we have unlocked the secret of time travel!

Also upon observing a cat walking into a beam of sunlight, it is immediatly rendered helpless, and unable to move. It is clear from Darwin that such an characteristic could not have evolved in a light filled environment, so the cat must have evolved before light existed. Therefore I propose that naturally-occuring buttered cats existed before the big-bang.

[Chronos]

At first I thought that Achernar had nailed it, but then it occured to me: We all know that a parity inversion is equivalent to a charge conjugation and a time reversal, right? So, instead of having a piece of toast falling onto the ground, we'd have a piece of antitoast unfalling from the ground.

[Joe_Cool]

Originally posted by Billdo
Of course, if you use Schroedinger's cat for this experiment, there's only a 50% chance of this happening.

Does anybody besides me wonder what Schroedenger's home life was like? Was his basement a veritable cat graveyard? Did he leave them in the boxes, or was it just heaped to the ceiling with dead cats? How many cats did he need to prove his conjecture? Where the hell did he get all those cats? And just what did he have against cats, anyway? Why not something less desirable like, say, perhaps Schroedenger's Centipede? That way, people would be motivated to continue the research, learning about quantum physics the hands-on way. I mean, who would want to have a simultaneously-live-and-dead zombie cat in a box? Not me! But nobody would object to killing a bunch of centipedes! After all, as Oppenheimer was heard to remark after the first successful Atomic Bomb test, "KLAATU BARADA NIKTO."

xtnjohnson:
So here we have the explanations for the nine lives - three of them are curled up in the "extended" dimensions we can see, and the other six are curled up in the curled-up dimensions we can't see.

If cats are curled up in curled-up dimensions, does that mean cats have six dimensions of square curlage, equal to 6c²? What are the implications of this?

[BPBob]

Originally posted by wolfman
Therefore I propose that naturally-occuring buttered cats existed before the big-bang.

Wolfman, it would appear that I can substantiate this theory, as all my cats will flip through other dimensions instantaneously whenever anything in my house goes bang. I have also seen my cats levitate up to two meters from a position of relative rest, but this is a difficult experiment to repeat in the field. Cats also appear to be more at ease in the dark, further support of your proposition. Finally, you cannot take a photograph of a sleeping cat, because they know when a flash will occur before it takes place, which adds the intriguing notions of either causality or time travel, yet again!

Also, we have not taken into account the energy states of cats exposed to photons for extended periods of time, which radically affects their inertia. Whenever my cats are in the window on sunny days, they tend to curl more (a correlation with the nine-dimensional principle) and they appear to gain mass (absorbing light like a black hole?!?!)

I have recently tried to perform a reciprocal state trial in which the bottom of the cat was buttered, in order to establish a firmer orientation "downward" but my results were inconclusive. And my wife made me mop the whole kitchen.

[labradorian]

[quote]Originally posted by Joe_Cool

If cats are curled up in curled-up dimensions, does that mean cats have six dimensions of square curlage, equal to 6c²? What are the implications of this?

At least two of my experimental apparatuses are capable of curling in at least six dimensions. My third is comprised of a larger proportion of lipids, which would appear (at least in this small sample) to inhibit the curling tendency.

I am not sure of the implications (felinophysics not being my strong suit), but as an enlightened dilletante, I offer the observation that c seems to increase in inverse proportion with the ambient temperature. I propose, though I have not been able to confirm, that as you approach absolute zero, c would approach infinity.

I leave that experiment for that weirdo Schroedinger; he likes to mess around with cats. Where's the SPCA when you need them?

[labradorian]

Originally posted by BPBob
Finally, you cannot take a photograph of a sleeping cat, because they know when a flash will occur before it takes place, which adds the intriguing notions of either causality or time travel, yet again!

This deserves closer investigation. Certain cats can predict the future motion of certain polymer compounds, especially those with grated sides and doors, door locks, and handles, of a type generally used for cat containment.

At the same time, other cats -- or even the same cat -- appear to be temporily impaired in that past action is mis-interpreted as future action. For instance, should you perform decontamination on the cat by-product containment unit, the cat seems to misinterpret this past action as a future action, and will return to the unit to excrete additional by-products, seemingly in expectation that the putative future decontamination is about to take place. Similarly, certain cats misinterpret the span of time from 0500 to 0600 hours, or even earlier, to be 0700 or 0730, and perform certain social rituals associated with the provision of nutritional substance.

[CalMeacham]

I think you folks are making it all too complicated. Strapping two cats back to back? Heck, I've bathed our cats, and I think that's too much work.

To make toast float all you have to do it not butter it on either side.






A much more interesting experiment is to butter toast on [i/]both[/i] sides. I'm going to try this one at home tonight. I'm convinced the toast will spontaneously fission when dropped, allowing both buttered sides to land downwards. No radioactive byproducts should be emitted, therefore giving us clean fission!

[Ogre]

Coincidence? Of course not. Moreover, it turns out that six of them are...curled up! Now what is it that cats do more than anything excepting, perhaps, hedgehogs and armadillos? Of course! So here we have the explanations for the nine lives - three of them are curled up in the "extended" dimensions we can see, and the other six are curled up in the curled-up dimensions we can't see.

Wait, so all we really have to do to make the 6 "curled-up" dimensions detectable from our frame of reference is to strap a buttered croissant to a cat's back and drop it!

The multidimensional existence of all cats would instantly become perceptible. Lovecraft would be so proud.

[jonpluc]

ok...a variation on the cat theme. Whats happens if you throw an amputee cat out a window?? Does he always land on his belly?? If he needs his arms and legs to manuver this trick can he do it with 3 limbs or just one?? Im very disturbed dont mind me ill be in the corner playing with centapedes

[Chronos]

One of the cats that tolerates my mom's presence in the house only has two functional limbs. She still lands on those two feet.

[yastobaal]

Originally posted by Achernar
Well what if the cat lands on its feet, but the toast tunnels through the cat, and undergoes a parity reversal? Then it'd still land butter-side down.

Another question. It's commonly believed that a cat with nothing on its back lands feet first. Where do people get off extending this to cats with cargo? And would it apply to a cat with, say, a refrigerator on its back?

And if the cat lands on it's feet with a refrigerator on its back? Then you have the problem of cleaning up the cat even if it has 9 lives

[yastobaal]

Originally posted by Achernar
Well what if the cat lands on its feet, but the toast tunnels through the cat, and undergoes a parity reversal? Then it'd still land butter-side down.

Another question. It's commonly believed that a cat with nothing on its back lands feet first. Where do people get off extending this to cats with cargo? And would it apply to a cat with, say, a refrigerator on its back?

And if the cat lands on it's feet with a refrigerator on its back? Then you have the problem of cleaning up the cat even if it has 9 lives

[BPBob]

Originally posted by jonpluc
ok...a variation on the cat theme. ... Im very disturbed dont mind me ill be in the corner playing with centapedes

Actually, me boyo, no you won't. Because the cats will beam in first and EAT the centipedes!!

Originally posted by CalMeacham
I think you folks are making it all too complicated. Strapping two cats back to back? Heck, I've bathed our cats, and I think that's too much work. To make toast float all you have to do it not butter it on either side.
A much more interesting experiment is to butter toast on both sides. I'm going to try this one at home tonight. I'm convinced the toast will spontaneously fission when dropped, allowing both buttered sides to land downwards. No radioactive byproducts should be emitted, therefore giving us clean fission!

This does not take into account the age of the toast. To float toast properly it must be cooled - haven't you noticed that toast does not go orbital coming out of the toaster? I think this supports my earlier thesis about cats absorbing photons - cats and toast have reciprocal characteristics. But I digress... by cooling the toast, you may also be providing cold fusion - to heck with clean fission - and anyway, you know how dangerous it is to go fission with cats??? You wind up with all kinds of heavy water!!! Neutrinos up your nose! GKW factor permeating the woodwork!! Mass Steria! Friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground! Trouble right here in river city... but I digress.

[BPBob]

Holy cats! I nearly missed this one! Toast is rectilinear (please, no fundament jokes) which fundamentally links it (I couldn't stop myself ) to the six hidden dimensions in which cats curl! Toast has SIX SIDES!!! This must eliminate the parity question (no experimental data supports toast tunneling) AND provide the universal constant which re-orients the cat relative to the planetary body's gravitational field... Wow! I gotta get a six-slice toaster! _{BUT PERHAPS I'VE SAID TOO MUCH...}

Wait a minute, rye bread is ellipsoidal... damn.
Maybe it's a hyperbolic sort of thing... _{Where's my calculator???}

[AngelFelina]

Mmmm.... when I drop something on my cat (ball, yarn, my hand, the dog), it always lands on the cat's feet. Does this mean anything?

[AngelFelina]

Also, have you ever seen a cat jumping on another cat? They both land on each other's feet... URGH! My head!

[dunne u. wurrie]

Uh, Hi. I'm only 9 years old. I was just wondering, are you people really as smart as you seem? Cuz if you are, how come you're not out curing cancer or something?

I was just wondering.

[mmtutti]

Originally posted by yastobaal
And if the cat lands on it's feet with a refrigerator on its back? Then you have the problem of cleaning up the cat even if it has 9 lives

If the refridgerator only exists in three spatial dimensions, will all of the cat's lives be snuffed, or just three of them? Will the cat escape the whole thing via the other dimensions? Has this ever been put to test (yet)?

[BPBob]

Originally posted by mmtutti

If the refridgerator only exists in three spatial dimensions, will all of the cat's lives be snuffed, or just three of them? Will the cat escape the whole thing via the other dimensions? Has this ever been put to test (yet)?

Well, well, well
The space-time curvature question can best be addressed by substituting a modern Coke or Pepsi machine with the curved front. You MUST tape the cat to the front surface however.

On the other hand, I think that by getting a loaf of bread the size of a refrigerator and selecting a slice from the center (make all measurements metrically, the math is much easier) will eliminate all questions. Questions of relative mass are mere celestial mechanics; you people all got PC's dontcha? DO THE MATH.
_{I went to my celestial mechanic and now my wallet has a black hole!} :wally:

Hey - Why isn't Opalcat in this thread??

[Grimace]

Hmmmm. There was a thread on the telepotation abilities of felines by matt_mcl here.

I wonder if any of the theories there may assist in this disscussion. Apparently the feline species holds the secrets of the universe in it's furry body!

[Solomon7t]

Perhaps the Cat is the physical manifestation of god? Maybe thats how he always knows where everyone is and what their doing. Then if we were able to destroy all the cats in the world, god would have no idea what were going ever. muhahahaha

[BPBob]

Originally posted by Solomon7t
Perhaps the Cat is the physical manifestation of god? Maybe thats how he always knows where everyone is and what their doing. Then if we were able to destroy all the cats in the world, god would have no idea what were going ever. muhahahaha

Quick, while he's not looking, put the Roach powder into this cup of tea, and then Oh, hi, Sol, howya doin??

OF COURSE cats are the manifestation of God... how else could they command total obedience from the Crown of Creation, the Paragon Of Animals How Noble In Reason?
Has anyone worked out the formulae for weight ratios of cat-to-refrigerator/soda machine/gravitational constant yet? My calculator has cheetos jammed into the keys...

[flickerwolf]

Well, what if we put a cat or a piece of toast into space, where there are multiple floors...If the the cat and/or toast land, where would it be...or if not, would they just perpetually spin in the absolute center of the room?

[kambuckta]

It's really very simple...if you don't LOOK at either of them, if you refrain from OBSERVING, then they will land right-side-up, both of them. It's the act of observation that causes them to swerve...

[Steve Burwen]

In regard to the idea of putting a piece of buttered bread on the cat's back, it's also possible that the two forces will just cancel each other out and the cat will land on his side!

[mmtutti]

If we further examine the issue of the three-dimensional refridgerator vs. the nine-dimensional feline, the thought arises that if the piece of toast also exists in merely three dimensions, does the cat's greater amount of available dimensions cause the gravitational characteristics of the animal to counteract those of the toast? In other words, given the cat's unique quality of existence, does it rule out all other laws of gravitational behaviour? The cat is a space-time constant!

[BPBob]

Originally posted by mmtutti
In other words, given the cat's unique quality of existence, does it rule out all other laws of gravitational behaviour? The cat is a space-time constant!

Too true; cats are constantly taking up my space and time... This would also explain why cats believe the world revolves around them!! _{WOW what if you had a BLONDE cat ...with white bread toast... ???}

[Spiked]

Originally posted by flickerwolf
Well, what if we put a cat or a piece of toast into space, where there are multiple floors...If the the cat and/or toast land, where would it be...or if not, would they just perpetually spin in the absolute center of the room?

This one's already been tried. Back in the days of the early space program some one wondered how cats orient themselves - gravity or visual cues. So they sent a cat up in the cockpit of a jet fighter sitting on the pilot's lap, the pilot does a parabola, zero gravity in the plane, camera films result, scientists are happy, yes? Unfortunately the film didn't really show how cats orient themselves. What it showed was a pilot frantically trying to detatch a cat from his arm, & the cat frantically resisting. Eventually, the cat was torn off & placed in mid air, only to float (feet first of course) back to the pilot & then there was no shaking it off. So it seems that in zero-gravity, cats will automatically land on the nearest human.

[hibernicus]

Spiked, that was the funniest first post I've ever seen. Welcome to the SDMB.

[Joe_Cool]

[quote]Originally posted by labradorian

Originally posted by Joe_Cool

...that c seems to increase in inverse proportion with the ambient temperature. I propose, though I have not been able to confirm, that as you approach absolute zero, c would approach infinity.

EUREKA!!!! That's the answer to interstellar travel! You build a cat-matrix (constructed of wood and covered in carpet) into your ship, then chill the cat to near-absolute zero. The cat curls up, causing c to increase and approach infinity as temperature approaches zero. A local increase in the speed of light, enabling you to travel at hyperfast speeds without violating relativity! MUAHAHAHAHAHA Off to the patent office!
(something tells me it's strangely appropriate for my new sig to debut in this thread)

[Joe_Cool]

Originally posted by Joe_Cool
(something tells me it's strangely appropriate for my new sig to debut in this thread)

So naturally I forgot to include it...

[morrigan]

It seems to me that you are all making this far too difficult.

If you want to make a cat float, all you need is a cat, some root beer and a couple of scoops of ice cream.

Same thing applies for buttered toast.

[Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems]

Originally Posted by dunne u. wurrie

Uh, Hi. I'm only 9 years old. I was just wondering, are you people really as smart as you seem? Cuz if you are, how come you're not out curing cancer or something?

I was just wondering.

Ahhh, a valid question,and nice always to see inquiring young minds here...I can't speak for everyone, but in my case I do have a cat and toast available,
I do not have much else in the way of sophisticated lab equipment. In fact, I can't seem to find the Band-aides necessary to stem the bloodflow resulting from repeated attempts to butter my less-than-cooperative cat. Who seems to be much less scientifically-minded than I would have hoped...

[Czarcasm]

Originally Posted by Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems

Ahhh, a valid question,and nice always to see inquiring young minds here...I can't speak for everyone, but in my case I do have a cat and toast available,
I do not have much else in the way of sophisticated lab equipment. In fact, I can't seem to find the Band-aides necessary to stem the bloodflow resulting from repeated attempts to butter my less-than-cooperative cat. Who seems to be much less scientifically-minded than I would have hoped...

1. The person you are responding to hasn't been here since 2002.
2. I doubt that he was really 9 at the time he wrote that, seeing as how he talked about a secretary at the industry he worked at in a subsequent thread.
3. Even if he was actually 9 at the time of his post in this thread, he's about 20 now.

[TubaDiva]

Aw. this ancient thread was resurrected and wound up being used as a more recent Threadspotting ... because even though it's been a long time the thread is so stupendous it's worth showing again.

You can't blame someone for responding to it, it was featured.

And it's still a great thread, regardless of the outcomes of some of the Dopers who posted to it.

[TubaDiva]

Perhaps I should ask ... it's been a long time, has there been any progress made on this front since the original posting? Ten plus years is a lot of science in the home!

[Powers]

Originally Posted by TubaDiva

Perhaps I should ask ... it's been a long time, has there been any progress made on this front since the original posting? Ten plus years is a lot of science in the home!

In 2005, the Mythbusters determined that toast-landing was a product of the way it was knocked off the table, rather than inherent property of butter-weighted bread.

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/my...t-minimyth.htm


Powers &8^]

[Zarquan]

You've got to put the bread buttered side down on the cat's back. Otherwise it won't work!

I see that this entry is dated more than a year and a half ago, so I am certain that I'm too late to prevent the death or injury of a perfectly innocent slice of bread.

[TriPolar]

When a cat with buttered toast attached to it's back falls, the universe splits in two. In one universe cats always land on their feet, and toast never lands butter side down. In the other universe toast always lands butter side down, and cats never land on their feet. Our universe was created from one of those type universes where someone attached four pieces of toast, butter side down, to a cat's feet, and dropped it.