Why Do Cats Land on Their Feet? |Mlife Daily|BS Chandra Mohan

In New York City in 2018, a cat reportedly fell from the window of a 32nd-floor apartment onto hard asphalt—and survived. After a two-day stay at the vet, who treated a collapsed lung and broken teeth, the four-legged friend was able to return home. It’s likely that other similar situations have given rise to the adage that cats have nine lives. For decades, researchers from a wide range of disciplines have been trying to understand their amazing survival skills.

But it was not the animals’ falls from dizzying heights that first puzzled physicists in the late 19th century. Instead experts were stumped by photographs of cats spinning on their own axis while falling and then landing on their feet. Images from that time show a person holding a cat by its legs so that its back is facing the ground. Then the animal is released. At first, the feline floats upside down in the air with its back facing the ground. But in the next shots, something happens that seems to defy the laws of physics: the cat turns and lands on its paws.

Of course, people knew from everyday observations that these quadrupeds can turn in the air. But it had been assumed that they obtain the momentum necessary for this movement by pushing off from the surface from which they fall. That’s because according to the conservation of angular momentum, it is impossible for an object that is not spinning to suddenly rotate without external influence. Yet that is exactly what the photographs show. Initially the cat falls straight down. Then it manages to rotate on its own axis. How is that possible?...

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