They can fall from probably limitless heights and survive. They can pivot off of not anything to land on their toes. Cats give the laws of physics Scientists nevertheless can’t absolutely give an explanation for why.
In October of 1894, at a assembly of the French Academy of Sciences, the famend physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey confirmed a sequence of pix that despatched his colleagues into collective uproar. In the flurry of money owed that followed, one convention attendee proclaimed that Marey had provided a systematic paradox that violated the essential legal guidelines of ways items moved.
At the middle of the debate became a cat. Specifically, a dropped cat that had, in midair, twisted to land on its toes. The fall wasn’t the problem, nor became the touchdown. The scandal became sparked with the aid of using what came about in between.
For years, scientists had assumed that cats ought to land on their toes best in the event that they first released themselves off a surface. The concept hewed to a bodily idea referred to as conservation of angular momentum, which states that our bodies that aren’t rotating won’t begin until a few outside pressure is applied. Without a push, a cat could don’t have any leverage, not anything to set off it to show proper facet up. But Marey’s photos discovered a cat that started its contortions after its descent had begun, pivoting, it seemed, off of not anything at all.
In the a long time following, scientists supplied up lots of factors for the puzzle, lots of them completely lacking the mark. Even today, “you’ll nevertheless discover that humans are arguing” approximately the info of cats’ tumbly tricks, says Greg Gbur, a physicist on the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the writer of Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics. But professionals can agree that cats are (sadly, perhaps) now no longer defying physics. They’ve simply developed to make the most its inner most nuances—even if the situations appear not possible to survive.
The baffled physicists on the French Academy have been considering the cat’s angular momentum too simplistically, Gbur instructed me. Angular momentum can nevertheless be conserved inside a spinning object—er, cat—if 1/2 of of the frame rotates in a single path whilst the alternative 1/2 of turns the alternative way, kind of like a pepper grinder. The bits of the frame then act as every different’s fulcrums, presenting on each other an same and contrary shove-y, twisty pressure. Which is precisely what seems to take place in cats. “The cat skeleton is extraordinarily flexible,” says Barbro Filliquist, a veterinary general practitioner at UC Davis. Cats can arch their backbone so sharply that they efficaciously break up their frame into , nearly like “having a knee joint on pinnacle of your again,” says David Hu, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech.
Cats give the laws of physics
When a cat falls via the air upside down, the 1/2 of with the pinnacle is normally the primary to flip. For that to take place, the the front has to show extra fast than the again—a circulate the cat probable initiates with the aid of using tucking its forepaws in the direction of its tummy (comparable to parent skaters pulling of their palms whilst executing a fast twirl) whilst the again paws continue to be splayed. The cat then relaxes its the front legs out whilst yanking its again limbs in. This time, the bit with the bum twists faster, bringing the relaxation of the frame to the proper-facet-up position. Meanwhile, the tail may, delightfully, act as a sort of propeller, rushing the frame’s spins. (This is an useless perk, Gbur instructed me: Manx cats stick their landings simply fine.)
The flippy flop happens “distinctly quick,” says Hanno Essén, a physicist on the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden, who has modeled the cat righting reflex. Cats can reorient themselves inside multiple toes, kick-beginning the technique inside a fragment of a second. That very impulse helped Essén’s mischievous formative years cat, Moushe, land appropriately after falling from a window a few forty to 50 toes off the ground.
Despite their aerodynamic antics, cats nevertheless face big danger once they topple from tall perches, specifically as cutting-edge homes in city facilities have grown better. At the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center in New York, almost 1 / 4 of the pet-trauma instances during the last seven years had been logged as a “fall from height,” in step with Carly Fox, certainly considered one among AMC’s senior vets. In the worst instances, so-known as high-upward thrust syndrome can saddle pussycats with nosebleeds, mouth fractures, collapsed lungs, damaged legs, even ruptured organs.
The farther cats fall, the more serious off they normally are—at least, as much as a point. A smattering of research, inclusive of a few from AMC, has hinted that above six or seven stories, the charge of damage may stabilize or maybe reverse. That, scientifically,Cats give the laws of physics
If the pattern is legit, it would square with some cats’ shocking resilience at great heights. Gbur once saw a cat take an inconsequential 100-ish-foot tumble out of a tree; Fox recently treated one that survived a 19-floor fall. A cat named Sabrina once plunged 32 stories onto concrete and lived to tell the tale. Another, Jommi, reportedly fell 26 stories, punched through the roof of a tent, and was found grooming herself nearby, entirely unscathed. “I’ve seen cats that have fallen seven, eight, nine, 10 stories, and they have lacerations, maybe a broken leg, but those are fixable,” says Christine Rutter, an emergency and critical-care vet at Texas A&M University. Studies show that survival rates for high-rise syndrome in cats consistently clock above 90 percent, “which is wild to me, considering the ER and ICU I work in,” says Sophia Amirsultan, an emergency and critical-care vet at North Carolina State University.
The secret may involve cats slipping through another physics loophole. Within the first few dozen feet of descent, a cat’s body will keep accelerating, upping the impact it will feel when it finally hits the ground. That’s a pretty rough deal for cats that topple out at approximately two to five stories. Just past that fifth floor, though, an 11-pound cat will hit its terminal velocity of about 60 miles per hour; no matter how much higher its starting point, its final thud won’t be worse. The implications are bonkers: There may not actually exist a true limit, Allain told me, to the elevation from which a cat can plunge and survive.
Reaching terminal velocity can feel pleasantly weightless, and might even make the cat’s brain “stop freaking out” and its legs loosen, Rutter told me. Impact still happens, but it’s a tad more sproingy and a smidge more evenly distributed across the cat’s body. That could explain why Kato has found that the types of injuries he and his colleagues see at heights of seven stories and above tend to be more focused on the torso and jaw than the limbs.
Rabbits, too, appear to have a pretty decent righting reflex; certain types of geckos, scientists have found, can propel themselves safely down to the ground by whipping their extra-thick tails. But perhaps only house cats achieve the perfect combo: an amazing sense of balance, to quickly sense when they need to flip, plus lightning-fast reflexes, a bendable back, and super-stretchy limbs to carry it out, Mairin Balisi, a paleontologist at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, in California, told me. Cats, which have evolved to be agile and arboreal, may even be aided by their fluid, slightly shock-absorbing physique, Amirsultan told me. Dogs, several vets told me, tend not to fare as well after a fall. Even some bigger species of cats may not always stick the landing, Balisi said. (If they did, she added, The Lion King would never have worked.)
Cats give the laws of physics
I asked Gbur if humans could learn to mimic cats’ gyroscopic turns. Arguably, he told me, we already have. The best divers and gymnasts can be awfully feline in their flips; NASA, too, has looked to cats to teach astronauts to cavort through gravity-free space. But cats will always “do it better,” Gbur told me—though they may not enjoy the trip down. Perhaps no one knew this better than Marey, the OG purveyor of photos of dropped cats: A Nature paper published the month after the conference couldn’t help but note the “expression of offended dignity” borne by his study subject, forever immortalized on film.
