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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.”
If cats are curled up in curled-up dimensions, does that mean cats have six dimensions of square curlage, equal to 6c[sup]2[/sup]? What are the implications of this?
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. :rolleyes:
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?
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.
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* 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!
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.
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
