Cats Defy The Law of Physics With Great Stretch

In October 1894, at a French Academy of Sciences meeting, renowned physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey showed photos that sent his colleagues into a collective turmoil.

The center of the talk was a feline. Specifically a dropped cat that had-in midair-twisted to land on its feet. The cat's fall wasn't the problem, nor its touchdown. The controversy sparked in what happened in between.

For years, scientists had assumed that cats could only land on their feet if they first launched themselves off the surface. The scheme hewed to a physical theory known as conservation of angular momentum. It states that bodies that are not rotating will start unless some external force is applied. Without pushing, the cat would have no leverage and nothing to induce it to turn right side up. Marey's photo revealed a cat that commenced acrobatics after its fall had begun, pivoting, and seeming off of nothing at all.

The Feline's Flexibility

In the following decade of study, scientists offered many explanations for the feline puzzle, many of them missing the mark. Even today, people will still argue about the details of cats' tumbling tricks, according to Greg Gbur, a physicist at Charlotte's University of North Carolina and the author of Falling Feline and Fundamentals of Physics. But some experts can nod that cats are (sadly, not perhaps) not defying physics. They believe that cats just evolved to show their deepest nuances-even when the situation seems impossible to survive.

The baffled physicists at the French Academy think about the cat's angular momentum in a simplistic manner. The angular momentum can be conserved within a spinning object-er cat-if half of the cat's body rotates in one direction while the other half turns to the left side, like a pepper grinder. The two sides of the body act on each other's fulcrums-imparting one another's equal and opposite twisty force.

Barbro Filliquist, a veterinary surgeon at UC Davis, described the car's vertebrae as incredibly flexible, that it can arch its spine sharply and effectively split its body into two, almost like "having a knee joint but on the back," says David Hu, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech.

When a feline falls through the air upside down, the first half of its body--with the head-is usually the first to flip. It happens when the front body turns more quickly than the back.

Cat 'Defying Physics'

The cat's movement probably initiates by tucking its forepaws to its tummy (akin-to-figure skaters pulling their arms while executing a quick twirl) while the back paws remain splayed. The cat relaxes its front legs while yanking its limbs in. For instance, the bit of the bum twists faster, bringing the rest of the body to the right-side-up position. Meanwhile, the cat's tail acts as a propeller, speeding the body's turn.

According to Hanno Essen, a physicist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, flippy flops happens quickly. He modeled the feline as the cat righting reflex.

The farther the cat falls, the worse off they usually are at some point. The smattering research adds some from AMC that hinted above six or seven stories about the rate of injury on the feline.

The cat reaching the terminal velocity can feel pleasantly weightless and may make the cat's brain stop freaking out and loosen.

Despite their aerodynamic stunts, feline species still face a high risk when they raze tall structures since urban centers become higher. Schwarzman Animal Medical Center in NYC said that nearly a quarter of pet-trauma cases in the past seven years were recorded as "falls from height," according to senior vet Carly Fox. In worst cases, so-called high-rise syndrome can burden the cats with nosebleeds, mouth fractures, broken legs, collapsed lungs, and even ruptured organs.

According to a study, survival rates for high-rise syndrome in felines are above 90%. This is wild to Sophia Amirsultan, an emergency and critical care vet at North Carolina State University. She handled cats with high-rise syndrome, usually admitted to ER and ICU.

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