The Purr-fessor at Study
A review of
Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics. By Gregory J. Gbur. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-300-23129-8. Pp. 352.
by Purr-fessor Linus Cattington
When clumsy humans fall down they just land, splat, on their faces, bums, or sides! What undignified behavior! Just last week I watched my owner tumble down a set of icy stairs in the most ridiculous way possible. It’s honestly a wonder their species has survived for so long.
Given humans’ lack of coordination, it’s not surprising that they’ve meow-veled at cats’ innate ability to land on our feet. Human scientists have therefore spent centuries trying to figure out just how we do it. Dr. Gregory Gbur’s Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics describes humans’ attempts to understand what makes us so purr-fect.
People a-purr-rently call cats’ ability to land on our feet the “righting reflex.” Gbur tracks humans’ scientific discoveries about this reflex. Readers hear about physiologists, including Étienne-Jules Marey, who used high-speed cameras to take photos of falling cats, and the team of Rademaker and ter Braak, who determined the most important component of cats’ rotation reflex: our patented “bend and twist” manuever (145). Other scientists used cats as models for astronauts when they wanted to figure out how people should turn over when floating in space. Humans even investigated “high rise syndrome” (185), which is apparently a relatively common event: cats falling from skyscrapers! (Don’t worry–we’re mostly unharmed after such an ordeal…but please don’t try it.) More recently, humans have created robots that emulate our impressive reflex.
At first I worried that humans might be inspired by this book to throw me out of a window. I therefore a-purr-ciated Gbur’s warning not to purposefully drop cats. And don’t get me started on “the most famous cat in all of physics”: Schrödinger’s imaginary, but clearly endangered, cat (277). Cats are not your test subjects, humans!
The person who understood this fact best was British scientist Giles Brindley. Because rabbits enjoy a similar righting reflex to cats, he chose to spin them, and not cats, in an elliptical catapult to learn more. Alas, Brindley failed to show this same intelligence when he invented an electronic instrument called the “logical bassoon” (148). Cats know it’s not logical to play any bassoon when you can just walk across the piano keys.
My fur-verite section of the book comes at the end, when we learn about human/cat teams of scientists. Physicist Robert Williams Wood owes some of his notoriety in spectroscopy to a dedicated cat, who cleaned his large spectorograph by walking through it. Nikola Tesla’s cat, Mcak, taught him about static electricity, while astronomer Edwin Hubble benefited from the expertise of a black cat by the name of Nicolas Copernicus. Most impressive is F.D.C. Willard, the first cat published in a prestigious human scientific journal–a task he likely took on to both bolster the career of his human co-author, Jack H. Hetherington, and to impress Marge Hetherington, Jack’s wife, who reportedly “takes it as a point of personal pride that she can say that she slept with both authors of the paper–often simultaneously” (286). Since that time Willard has thankfully stuck to scientific journals run by cats, where we mostly study humans and why they don’t understand the clear instructions we provide about food, brushing, and going outdoors.
Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics proves an excellent addition to the hiss-story of human science. Let’s hope it encourages more cat-human collaborations…and less dropping of cats.
To find your own copy of this book click here!
Note: This review was originally composed for an important, yet short-lived intellectual home for the scholarly cat-munity: Cat’s Meow Quarterly. Back in 2021, Dr. Cattington had been in contact to become a catributor. Unfortunately, the publication went defunct before the Purrfessor’s submission had been received. Hence this book review sat amongst his many brilliant unpublished works. Upon his passing, Cattington’s editor and friend discovered this review in his dusty files and decided to bring it to publication.