yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Slow Motion Flipping Cat Physics | Smarter Every Day 58


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Hey, it's me Destin. Welcome back to SmarterEveryDay! So you've probably observed that cats almost always land on their feet. Today's question is why.

Like most simple questions, there's a very complex answer. For instance, let me reword this question: How does a cat go from feet up to feet down in a falling reference frame without violating the conservation of angular momentum? Now, I've studied free-falling bodies—my own, in fact, in several different environments. Once I get my angular rotation started in one direction, I can't stop it.

Today, we're going to use a high-speed camera. We're not going to use Alley because this is my daughter's cat; I don't want to hurt it. We're going to use a stunt cat. Let me introduce you to Gi-Gi, the stunt cat. (music) I'll just flip the, uh, the video vertical and then motion track the cat. It's just going to take a lot more effort in post. We're going to try to do it in a way that doesn't make anybody mad. That's pretty hard to do.

You gotta drop the cat. Ready, Gi-Gi? Good kitty! Checking out the high-speed data there, Gi-Gi? Okay, the first thing a cat does when it's falling is try to figure out which way is up. It does this either with the gyro in the ear or with its eyes. Ready to talk cat physics? Alright.

So check out this footage I captured with the Phantom Miro while Gi-Gi goes to get a drink of water. So here's what's interesting about this, to me. You'll notice that at the beginning of the drop, the cat is not rotating; halfway through the drop, the cat is rotating, and at the very end, Gi-Gi somehow stopped rotating. Newton's law says an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted on by an external force. I see no external forces on this cat.

So what's happening here? It's not making sense to me. O.K., so in order to really get the right data, we're going to have to drop her 90 degrees out of phase. Atta girl! This time watch her tail. 3, 2, 1!

More Articles

View All
Envy Can Be Useful, or It Can Eat You Alive
Do you want to tell us about some of the jobs that you had as a youth and the specific job that kicked off your fanatical obsession with creating wealth? This gets a little personal, and I don’t want to do the humble brag thing. There was some thread goin…
How We’re Fooled By Statistics
Which is most effective for helping people learn: punishment or reward? Well, consider the case of Israeli fighter pilot training, because instructors there found that negative feedback was far superior to positive feedback. If a cadet performed a particu…
I BOUGHT MY DREAM CAR!
Well guys, I finally did it! After years and years and years of literally, I’d, I’ve never owned my own car. After years of just riding a motorcycle and just bashing that around to get from A to B, and riding in the rain and all those horrible things, I …
The Cosmic Calendar | Cosmos: Possible Worlds
This cosmic calendar compresses all of the last 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang into a single calendar. Either every month is a little more than a billion years, every day a little less than 40 million. A single hour is almost 2 million years. That …
The Simple Guide To Start Anything
If you want to start a podcast, or write a book, or make a game, or build an app, or start any kind of business, well, where do you actually start? What’s the first thing, and what’s the last thing you do? There’s almost 8 billion people on this planet, a…
What's Inside Your Paper Money? | Origins: The Journey of Humankind
The United States is so obsessively protective of its currency that it guards its security right down to the specific fibers that comprise each bill. US currency may be the most counterfeited money in the world. McCrane Paper here in Dalton became the sup…