Cats and Physics

The other day, I was sitting on my couch. Suddenly I hear a rumble from across the room. It is my dog chasing my cat again. So as they both race into the room in which I am sitting, my cat leaps into the air, and with complete precision, hits the top part of my couch and ricochets to hit the floor and keep running. I know this is hard to visualize because I am poor at describing my cats movements at that point. To give an easier example of my point, I see my cat jump from ledge to ledge with complete precision all the time and so this always gets my mind going.

Being a man of science and more specifically a man of physics, I always wonder how much knowledge of physics cats must have in there brain. Even if they don't really understand anything they must have locked away in there a calculator that is always calculating physics equation after physics equation to be able to time and time again completely astound me with there accuracy.

I was listening to a podcast called "Radio Lab" which is a science podcast with a lot of interesting topics. On one particular episode they were talking about sleep, and so they played a clip of what a cat brain sounds like when it sleeps. Actually I wasn't all that surprised at what I heard for I knew that cats must have some very active brains, but it was quite interesting that at night, a cats brain sounds like a war zone with neurons firing constantly. So then I thought if this is what it is like at night I can't even imagine what it is like during the day.

This all relates back to my initial question which was what kind of physics knowledge cats have in there. Now of course I am not talking about the kind of knowledge that I have but the ability to make a jump from a ledge to another ledge with complete precision must require your brain to be able to calculate how much power you must use, and at which angle you must leap at to obtain the correct trajectory to complete the jump. So going back to cats having very active brains my conclusion is that in a part of this active brain is a little physicist in there making all of the necessary calculations in split second time so that when my fierce dog is chasing him, he will never fail at being quicker, and evidently smarter than my dog.