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The Surprisingly Complicated Physics of Why Cats Always Land on Their Feet

  • Web Diva
    Leader
    August 19, 2023 8:29 AM CDT
    How do cats always land on their feet and the physics behind it. [url=https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-surprisingly-complicated-physics-of-why-cats-always-land-on-their-feet?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us]https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-surprisingly-complicated-physics-of-why-cats-always-land-on-their-feet?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us Gbur: This is part of why it was such a challenge: all these different motions play a role. If you're looking at a series of photographs or a video of a falling cat, it becomes almost a psychological problem. Different people, their attention is going to be drawn by different aspects of a motion. But the most important is a bend and twist motion. The cat bends at the waist and counter rotates the upper and lower halves of its body in order to cancel those motions out. When one goes through the math, that seems to be the most fundamental aspect of how a cat turns over. But there are all these little corrections on top of that: using the tail, or using the paws for additional leverage, also play a role. So the fundamental explanation comes down to essentially bend and twist, but then there's all these extra little corrections to it. *Please do not purposely experiment with your cat. This is just an informational article.
  • Mark Ransome
    August 19, 2023 4:19 PM CDT
    Very interesting article, thanks! I don't think they have got to the bottom of it though yet and as for getting a robot to perform like this, well, I would say that is a good few years away yet. If you think about it, how many muscles does it take a cat to perform this? You would surely have to replicate that in a robot, how many muscles are in a cat let alone any other animal or human for that matter! As for to quote: "I often say that cats are cleverer than we think, but less clever than they think." I often think cats are more cleverer than we think, they just don't show it all the time, maybe that's what makes them so mischievous! As for "Tuck and turn", well that sounds a bit like me trying to do my Aqua Aerobics!
  • Web Diva
    Leader
    August 20, 2023 9:11 AM CDT
    You're welcome! Cats are so agile, it would seem it's a whole body of muscles in extreme fast reaction motion that initiates the swing to paws to the floor. Agree, robotics have come a long way, but their biological replicas aren't fluid like a biological species as a robot would be seen very clunky to perform an action and to wit anything aerial, such as being dropped a few feet would be a daunting task for a robotics engineer to calculate and recreate. Almost like how a figure skater does a complicated jump. It looks so easy when skaters do it, but it's really a bunch of physics in split second motions that initiates and completes the motion in any given jump.