A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
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A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
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Re: A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
#2I think it's cos they don't want to get hurt landing on their back.
Now how they do it is a different question all together.
Ps, awesome video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R... , article is pretty useless.
Re: A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
#3It's actually a very neat trick, kind of similar to the way ice dancers speed up or slow down their rotation. Why aren't we using this instead of (or in addition to) flywheels for attitude control in spacecraft? It seems a cat-like mechanism of shifting angular momentum around could help reduce fuel costs by lessening the need to load/unload energy through maneuvering thrusters.
Re: A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
#4For the higher math involved:
http://count.ucsc.edu/~rmont/papers/cat.PDF
For the humor value: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/87351
Re: A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
#5As a physics buff, I'm sure this is fascinating, but I just could not bring myself to watch the video - I love my cats too darn much, lol.
Re: A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
#6As a physics buff, I'm sure this is fascinating, but I just could not bring myself to watch the video - I love my cats too darn much, lol.
A lot of cats can be fussy / scared when people try to make them do things, but the cat in the video didn't seem to mind at all.
Re: A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
#7It's actually a very neat trick, kind of similar to the way ice dancers speed up or slow down their rotation. Why aren't we using this instead of (or in addition to) flywheels for attitude control in spacecraft? It seems a cat-like mechanism of shifting angular momentum around could help reduce fuel costs by lessening the need to load/unload energy through maneuvering thrusters.
I worked on designing such a thing while at university using differential angular momentum - kind of like a cube with a high-speed rotating wheel embedded in each face. The wheels on opposite faces cancelled out each other's angular momentum - but if you vary the speed of one of the wheels slightly, it would give a small amount of angular momentum about any desired axis.
Re: A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
#8As a physics buff, I'm sure this is fascinating, but I just could not bring myself to watch the video - I love my cats too darn much, lol.
A lot of cats can be fussy / scared when people try to make them do things, but the cat in the video didn't seem to mind at all.
At first I was skeptical as well, but it turned out there is no reason to worry. He picked the right cat for the job. She was totally cooperative and it seems like she thought it was a game of some sort. It's obvious from the video that the cat was neither frightened nor angry.
In fact towards the end of the video, another cat makes a brief appearance (the guy just wanted to present her to the camera, no throwing or falling involved at all) and it serves as a good demonstration what it looks like when they're not in the mood for human shenanigans.
Re: A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
#9Oh boy. Linking to this opened a real can of worms for my productivity. The guy in the video had a whole channel of similar content and then goes ahead to link to even more content in the fields of chemistry and math.
Thank you for submitting this. You made my weekend!
Also, it's really cool to see videos like this that go such great lengths at explaining difficult stuff in such an interesting way, providing enough detail to get you started, but little enough so that you have to look it up in detail if you really want to know.
Re: A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet
#10Oh boy. Linking to this opened a real can of worms for my productivity. The guy in the video had a whole channel of similar content and then goes ahead to link to even more content in the fields of chemistry and math. Thank you for submitting this. You made my weekend! Also, it's really cool to see videos like this that go such great lengths at explaining difficult stuff in such an interesting way, providing enough d…
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