If I Strap a piece of buttered toast to my cat......?

Question

And drop her from a height, will it spin around and around in a type of perpetual motion.

Buttered toast always lands face down but cats always fall on their feet.

Answer 1

buttered toast lands face down because the heavier face tends to be on the bottom. However, a cat falls on its feet according to its will. So, when u strap a butter toast to a cat, the cat wud still want to land on its feet. The weight of the buttered toast is hardly anything to that of the cat and hence wont affect at all and hence the cat will land on its feet as if nothing is wrong.

Answer 2

This is a variation of Schroedinger's cat. Until the cat lands it is not right side up and butter side down. it is both yet neither. It is only by allowing the cat to land that it achieves a state of butter or feet down. However, as with most thought experiments, in reality the cat will lick of the butter before reaching the ground and hence resolve the apparent paradox. I'm not sure what will happen though if you get a cat that is allergic to butter or use a low fat spread instead. Maybe there is a PhD in this somewhere for a future researcher?

Answer 3

It depends if you strap the butter side up or down. If down I imagine it would remove the friction against the cats fur, allowing the slice to slide out of the strapping as the cat tumbles earthwards, leading to the cat landing on his feet, the butter being spread in a 2 foot radius on your kitchen floor and the toast being eaten by the now somewhat confused cat while you desperately grab at his collar with one hand whilst dropping another piece of bread in the toaster with t'other.

If however the bread is placed face up, the cat will continue to spin at a rate so fast it will create it's own gravitational pull and implode everything immediately around it into a mollecular singularity which could rip apart the fabric of time and space, so I don't recommend it.

Use vegetable spread instead - it's lighter and therefore produces much less gravitational pull (though I still wouldn't write off the chances of the cat imploding which, let's face it, will at least save you money on butter and bread)

Answer 4

The construction of your perpetual-motion machine is, like the construction of a fusion reactor, possible in theory but extremely hard in practice, involving many engineering problems.

First of all, the cat must be prevented from eating the buttered toast. An unmodified cat-toast pair usually fails after about twenty minutes for this reason, since the cat has either licked off the butter or eaten the toast. Once this happens, it is no longer buttered toast and does not retain its valuable buttered-side-down properties; and one usually ends up with a dizzy cat vomiting butter onto one's carpeting.

Another problem involves the strength of the connection between toast and cat. Because of the powerful nature of the attraction between cats' feet and ground, and also between buttered toast and ground, there is a great deal of force exerted on the connection between the two. This is a problem which does not occur in the simplified case of a hemispherical cat connected to a hemispherical piece of buttered toast; but in the more complicated case of a cat and piece of toast of the usual shapes, there is almost always some asymmetry.

This asymmetry causes a larger amount of force on one side of the connection, as one side of the cat-toast apparatus is more strongly attracted to the ground. In this case, the result is usually a breakage of the connection, and the separate parts of the assembly--cat and toast--fall to the ground in their respective, preferred manners.

Additionally there is the problem of having to maintain the cat's health while it is employed in supplying antigravity power. While a live cat will always land on its feet, this law does not hold true for dead cats. Necessitating repeated disassembly of what is already a delicate mechanism in order to allow the cat to feed, rest, and stretch its all-important earth-attracting feet, the upkeep of the feline component makes the mechanism not only delicate but intermittent in functioning.

The last but probably most important problem involved in the construction of a workable cat-toast apparatus is the need to exert force at the exact center of rotation between the two components. In order to make use of the levitating cat-toast pair, a somewhat more delicate version of an axle is needed--one which can not only withstand the stress of a constantly rotating cat-toast assembly and the pressure of whatever is being lifted via said assembly, but be thin enough to be inserted between cat and toast! Needless to say, a substance of such great strength and durability is hard to find; and those which have been found are too expensive to make manufacture easily.

For now, levitation depends on more mundane forces of nature, such as magnetism or Uncle Eddy's ghost. But perhaps, someday, someone will discover a way to make a cat-toast mechanism possible. Surely, this discoverer will be heralded as one of the greatest engineers of all time.

Answer 5

This is the famous "Puss on toast" paradox.

Many famous scientists have attempted to discredit each other's theories regarding this, but none has yet been able to prove their own theories through experiment. The reason being that the cat invariably scratches the hell out of whoever tries to strap the toast to them, they drop the cat and the toast seperately, the cat licks all the butter off the toast then goes off in a huff.

Should science devise a method of creating a cat / toast pair, my personal theory is that either: the cat / toast pair lands on its side since the two forces are in equal opposition but not in direct opposition of gravity, or: Immediately after dropping the cat / toast pair, a goblin suddenly appears and eats the cat / toast pair because it's quite partial to a bit of kitten-on-toast and likes to be thrown treats.

Cheers.

Answer 6

No, it would land on its feet then fall over. As the toast is above the cat it would'nt have actually 'landed' until the toast touches the ground. In this manner the physics is preserved and the world doesnt end due to a breach in the laws of physics.
Another hypothetical cat torture experiment was conducted by a man called Schroedinger that can be found in the link below where a cat is neither alive nor dead until it is observed which was to form the basis of quantum physics.

Answer 7

The cat is heavier so the cat goes first. The toast is lighter and goes after the cat.
The cat will land on its feet , gets confused by the toast landing on her head, gets up and runs away as far as she can go from her demented owner.
As for the buttered toast, it falls buttered face down (the fat is heavy) , the cat stepped through it.in her haste to get away. If you follow the trail of one buttered paw, you will find the poor thing huddled under the neighbors doorsteps.

Answer 8

Buttered toast doesn't always land face down. So your question is flawed from the start.

Answer 9

i do not recommend strapping pieces of toast to cats and dropping them from heights its cruel

Answer 10

If I were you I'd try putting the toast on your own head and then jump off a tall building. You might learn some sense on the way down but I doubt it.