university of north dakota Physics

Cat Physics

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles.
The wireless is the same, only without the cat- Albert Einstein

Law of Cat Inertia

A cat at rest will tend to remain at rest, unless acted upon by some outside force - such as the opening of cat food, or a nearby scurrying mouse.
Law of Cat Motion: A cat will move in a straight line, unless there's a really good reason to change direction.
Law of Cat Magnetism: All blue blazers and black sweaters attract cat hair in direct proportion to the darkness of the fabric.
Law of Cat Thermodynamics: Heat flows from a warmer to a cooler body, except in the case of a cat, in which case all heat flows to the cat.
Law of Cat Stretching: A cat will stretch to a distance proportional to the length of the nap just taken.
Law of Cat Sleeping: All cats must sleep with people whenever possible, in a position as uncomfortable for the people involved as is possible for the cat.
Law of Cat Elongation: A cat can make her body long enough to reach just about any countertop that has anything remotely interesting on it.
Law of Cat Acceleration: A cat will accelerate at a constant rate, until he gets good and ready to stop.
Law of Dinner Table Attendance: Cats must attend all meals when anything good is served.
Law of Rug Configuration: No rug may remain in its naturally flat state for very long.
Law of Obedience Resistance: A cat's resistance varies in proportion to a human's desire for her to do something.
First Law of Energy Conservation: Cats know that energy can neither be created nor destroyed and will, therefore, use as little energy as possible.
Second Law of Energy Conservation: Cats also know that energy can only be stored by a lot of napping.
Law of Refrigerator Observation: If a cat watches a refrigerator long enough, someone will come along and take out something good to eat.
Law of Electric Blanket Attraction: Turn on an electric blanket and a cat will jump into bed at the speed of light.
Law of Random Comfort Seeking: A cat will always seek, and usually take over, the most comfortable spot in any given room.
Law of Bag / Box Occupancy: All bags and boxes in a given room must contain a cat within the earliest possible nanosecond.
Law of Cat Embarrassment: A cat's irritation rises in direct proportion to her embarrassment times the amount of human laughter.
Law of Milk Consumption: A cat will drink his weight in milk, squared, just to show you he can.
Law of Furniture Replacement: A cat's desire to scratch furniture is directly proportional to the cost of the furniture

SCHRODINGER'S CAT BOX A fun project is the Schrodinger's Cat Box. You need a mild source of radioactivity (I use scrapings from old "luminous" watches I get at flea markets). I make a box out of plywood except that two sides are small celled Nomex honeycomb (<.125") cut to three inch thickness. One honeycomb side is covered with onion skin paper and the other is left open. A strong light is positioned outside the open celled honeycomb wall and is directed into the box. The radioactive scrapings are smeared across the light lens with a bit of glue. Inside the box I put the sensor to a Geiger counter (borrow one from your local high school). The counter is connected to a fast relay which, when closed by an alpha particle from the scrapings, lights the light. Now, a small, live animal (cat) is placed into the box. One stands behind the onion skin paper side of the box and plugs in the Geiger Counter. With no light the alpha particles are few and are not sufficient to turn on the light. The light is switched the first time with a switch which is in parallel with the relay. Instantly you can see the shadow of the animal on the onion skin paper. Then, as the cat moves, the light and rush of alpha particles turn the light on and off, strobe like, and you can see that sometimes the animal is not there, or some part of him is gone! It's quantum uncertainty can be measured. It proves that there are two states for the animal (and everything else) -- existence and non-existence. No harm comes to the animal, by the way.

The Schrodingers Cat experiment in Quantum Physics: Take one ordinary cat, one large box, a particle detector, a radiation source, a bottle of cyanide gas. Hook up the detector so that if it detects a particle from the radiation source, it will open the cyanide gas. Set it up inside the box in such a way that there will be a 50% probability of a particle being detected from the radiation source within a five minute period. Add the cat to the box. Theory says that the cat will enter a quantum state where it is 50% alive and 50% dead until the experimenter looks inside the box. However, reality teaches us that the severely pissed off cat cat WILL escape the box well before the 5 minutes are up, attack the experimenter and depart just in time for the severely lacerated experimenter to watch the hammer descend on the cyanide bottle one inch from his nose.