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phalling cats

jfrachioni

Entry posted by jfrachioni

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i have a problem. every time i pick up a cat to let it fall to its death, it manages to turn around mid air and land square on its feet, even when im not giving it any initial rotational speed. the law of conservation of angular momentum says that the cat can not start rotating after i have dropped it, assuming it starts with no angular momentum at all. so how they do it? turns out, they actually bend themselves into a v shape in mid air, breaking their rotational axis in two. this lets them turn their front half against their bottom half via muscles in their torso, resulting in both rotational motion along the center of mass, and along each side of the v they created with their body. this allows them to quickly spin around while still conserving their total angular momentum. when theyve turned 180 degrees, the cat simply bends out from the v shape, into what is more or less a line, in which state the cats is not turning at all, because the net angular momentum must be zero, conserved from the beginning. therefore, cats are immortal.

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bdavis

This is a phenomenon that i have been pondering since i saw a cat fall from a tree and land seemingly effortlessly on its feet. i like how you related it to angular momentum because it helped me to understand the remarkable movement cats display. I am in a state of awe regarding the cat.

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