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Cats Appear to Defy The Laws of Physics

At a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in 1894, the renowned physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey showed a series of photographs that sent his colleagues into collective uproar.


At the center of the controversy was a cat. Specifically, a dropped cat that had, in midair, twisted to land on its feet. The fall wasn’t the problem, nor was the touchdown. The scandal was sparked by what happened in between.


The falling cat experiment in 1894
The falling cat experiment.

For years, scientists had assumed that cats could land on their feet only if they first launched themselves off a surface, which conforms to a physical concept known as conservation of angular momentum, which states that bodies that aren’t rotating won’t start unless some external force is applied. Without a push, a cat would have no leverage, nothing to induce it to turn right side up. But Marey’s images revealed a cat that commenced its contortions after its descent had begun, pivoting, it seemed, off of nothing at all - thus, defying physics.


It took decades to resolve. Today, experts agree that cats are (sadly, perhaps) not defying physics. They’ve just evolved to exploit its deepest nuances - even when the circumstances seem impossible to survive.


Experts say that the baffled physicists at the French Academy were thinking about the cat’s angular momentum too simplistically. Angular momentum can still be conserved within a spinning object - er, cat - if half of the body rotates in one direction while the other half turns the other way, sort of like a pepper grinder. The two bits of the body then act as each other’s fulcrums, imparting on one another an equal and opposite shove-y, twisty force. Which is exactly what a falling cat can do.


 

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