May 23, 2023 • 28 mins
This episode of 6 Degress of Cats, the world's #1 (and only) cat-themed culture, history and science podcast is part one of a two-episode series on cats and science!
In part 1, we take a cue from cats and let our curiosity lead us through an exploration of how science and cats go hand in hand - er, paw in paw.
Join your host as she welcomes a stellar lineup of scientists - and comes to a slightly scientific conclusion of her own about cats! Materials scientist Titilayo Shodiya, Ph.D., host of hit pop science podcast Dope Labs and Vienna-based biophysicist Kareem Elsayad, Ph.D., share their insights on the invaluable role curiosity plays in hypothesis-driven research and break down the basics of scientific methodology. And writer and physicist Greg Gbur, Ph.D., of hit pop science book, “Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics” provides a fun survey of cats’ partnerships with scientists across time. Get ready to - once again - see cats in a whole new light.
Support the podcast, sign up for The Captain’s Log, the companion podcast newsletter and more here: linktr.ee/6degreesofcats.
Reference image:
About the experts:
- Kareem Elsayad, Ph.D., heads the Advanced Microscopy team at the Vienna Biocenter Core Facilities (VBCF) in Vienna, Austria. His research has broadly contributed to the fields of microscopy, high-resolution optical spectroscopy, and nanophotonics. Dr. Elsayad can be followed @kelsa909 on Twitter.
- Greg Gbur, Ph.D., is an American author and physicist who specializes in the study of classical coherence theory in optical physics. He is a full professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the Department of Physics and Optical Science. He writes the popular science blog, Skulls in the Stars and has published several hit pop science books, including Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics and Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen (both Yale University Press). Dr. Gbur can be followed @drskyskull on Twitter and Mastodon.
- Titilayo Shodiya, M.S., Ph.D., is the host of hit pop culture and science podcast, Dope Labs with co-host Zakiya Watson, Ph.D. Dr. Shodiya received her B.S. in Materials Science from Penn State University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science from Duke University. She currently works at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Dr. Shodiya can be followed @dr_tsho on Instagram and Twitter.
Producer, writer, editor, sound designer, host, basically everything*
- Captain Kitty (Amanda B.)
* with co-executive producers Binky & Snuggles
Animal voices include:
- Binky & Snuggles _^..^_
Opening and closing credits:
- Leathered: "Look Alive" (c) 2022
- Samples licensed via Loopcloud
- Additional sound effects from Pixabay.com
Logo design:
- Edward Anthony © 2024 (Instagram: @itsmyunzii)
Research used:
- Felton, J. (2022, September 22). The cat flap is surprisingly ancient, and not the work of Isaac Newton. IFLScience. Retrieved from https://www.iflscience.com/the-cat-flap-is-surprisingly-ancient-and-not-the-work-of-isaac-newton-65443
- Gbur, G. (2019). Falling felines and fundamental physics. Yale University Press.
- Gbur, G. (2022, July 22). The oldest falling cat explanation. Retrieved from https://skullsinthestars.com/2022/07/02/the-oldest-falling-cat-explanation/.
- George, S. C. (2022, September 23). 5 cats who owned famous scientists. Discover Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/5-cats-who-owned-famous-scientists
- Tearle, O. (2023, March 16). The interesting meaning and history of the phrase “curiosity killed the cat.” Interesting Literature. https://interestingliterature.com/2019/12/meaning-and-history-phrase-curiosity-killed-the-cat/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Binky, seriously, guy.
(00:03):
This is next-level script supervision here.
Why my keyboard?
Is that really so comfortable?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome back to 6 Degrees of Cats.
A podcast about how cats have shaped our past, present,
and future.
(00:24):
Hello, party peoples.
As you know, from listening in on 6 Degrees of Cats. here,
I, Captain Kitty, have a rather curious take on the world.
And guess the heck what?
My curiosity has led me down some really
winding, surprising avenues in my life and in my mind,
(00:47):
which is perpetually littered with kitties and questions.
We have come pretty far investigating so many interesting
and surprising connections.
But still, what are the relationships among all things
(01:09):
feline and human that have yet to be discovered?
How have they affected us and how have we affected them?
Not infrequently.
When explaining this podcast, I've had a lot of people ask me,
what the--
What?
To which I've replied, is there a question in there?
(01:29):
I get it.
The questions I--
I mean, we are asking.
And the research we're doing to get to the heart of it
are actually very serious science.
Very serious.
And if you don't take that seriously,
well, I have some actual real, very serious scientists
(01:50):
on hand.
And they're going to back me up here in this very episode.
And the next one.
In an unprecedented move, we're going to break it up
into two parts.
In this episode, we'll discuss the common traits
between scientists and cats.
And how hanging around cats has led
to some serious scientific innovation.
(02:12):
Cats and science have a long history together.
And yet, all things cat are
shockingly under-documented in comparison
to other domesticated animals, like dogs, which is not only
a huge injustice to all of feline kind.
(02:36):
It's probably one of the reasons we haven't
say cured the common cold, reversed climate change,
stabilized the world economy, and solved world peace.
OK, fine.
There may be a tiny bit of hyperbole in there,
but in this episode, we'll be speaking
(02:56):
to three of the four expert scientists of this two-part series
who have helped validate my hypothesis that cats have been
and continue to be very important catalysts
of scientific innovation.
Oh, yeah, one thing.
(03:18):
Before I get too much further in,
in this episode, I am not going to talk explicitly
about vivisection or the practice of using live animals
in experimentation.
I'm all about using what we can to who mainly promote scientific
discovery, so in a future episode, we'll
be talking much more about kitties and ethics.
(03:41):
Not this one, though.
Alrighty.
Since this is a science-y episode,
I think it's important that we all get on the same page here.
Any genius can make a bold statement
with lots of jargon and throwing a few numbers,
but that doesn't make it science.
(04:02):
So let's hear from our real genius.
I don't consider myself a genius by any stretch of the imagination.
I just more so identify as somebody that's just really curious
and takes their curiosity to the next level where it's like,
I'm going to find the answer.
I think you also follow this category.
(04:22):
That's why we're here now.
Gosh, I'm slattered.
I'll take it.
But enough about me.
Back to my extremely humble expert,
I'll allow her to introduce herself.
My name is Titi Shodiya, co-host of Dope Labs Podcast,
where we show how science intersects with pop culture.
(04:43):
I actually have a PhD in mechanical engineering
and material science.
My masters and PhD are both from Duke University.
I feel like I'm more of a material scientist
than a mechanical engineer, which is--
Material science is applied chemical engineering.
You might learn about things that are happening
(05:06):
on the molecular level and understand
structures of chemicals and things like that,
but then the materials engineer will take you a step further
and say, OK, well, how does this matter in the real world?
The materials that you use to make bridges,
the materials that we use for our computer screens,
all of these things are different.
(05:28):
And a material scientist was absolutely a part of that.
And what drew Dr. Shodiya to this particular field?
I want to know how things work.
I want to know why we choose to do things a certain way,
feeling like there are still additional questions
that can be asked here.
It's in this spirit that all scientists must work
(05:49):
in order to break down an observation, a pattern,
or a plain old question they have about how something works
in the physical world into something
they can describe, measure, and most importantly.
Produce models that are predictive,
and as fundamental as possible.
So it tries to be predictive.
(06:10):
And I mean, the question of how or why I think
he can always dig deeper.
It's like the kid that always asks why.
There's always going to be another why.
That was scientist number two, dialing in from Vienna.
My name is Kareem Elsayad.
My pronouns are he-- so I work for the medical university
(06:31):
of Vienna.
And I run a lab here where we develop optical techniques,
largely, and we try to understand the physics of the human body.
And I consider myself generally a physicist.
And that become more of a biophysicist.
There's generally, study human biology
and biological systems in general.
And we study a lot of systems.
We study everything from plants and to human anatomy
(06:54):
to various organisms.
So far, we have a material scientist and a biophysicist.
And they have something kind of special and common.
Besides being guests on this podcast, obviously,
I love the comparison Dr. Elsayad made
about being like a kid.
Dr. Shodiya mentioned that as well.
(07:16):
I think even when I was a kid, I had
showed the signs that being a researcher
and a scientist was something that I could do well.
I mean, I was taking things apart in the house,
which my parents probably were not enjoying.
And constantly asking questions and not really just letting
things go and say, OK, this is just how it is.
(07:37):
Science is a great place to feed those curiosities.
Curiosity.
What's that saying again?
Oh, right.
Curiosity killed the cat.
You know what?
Let's get this out of the way right now.
It didn't actually kill the cat because that saying
isn't actually a thing.
(07:57):
According to my research.
The phrase, Curiosity killed the cat
appears to have been a mutation of a far earlier expression.
Care killed a cat.
Meaning that excessive worry, rather than inquisitiveness,
will lead to harm.
The phrase seems to have changed in the 19th century
(08:18):
when Curiosity killed the cat became
established as the more famous expression.
I think that gives us license to move forward fearlessly, cat
friends.
No harm will come to us for being inquisitive in this episode,
or my name isn't Captain Kitty, which it isn't technically,
(08:38):
but anyway.
Possessing this trait isn't just incidental.
It's a must for any good scientist.
I think Curiosity is a big one.
And this is something that we say on the show all the time.
Scientists and everything in scientists for everybody.
I feel like most people, if not all people,
(09:00):
have the capacity to be scientists,
willing to ask the questions and find reputable sources
and test things out to get to a conclusion.
Let's take a moment to review what's called the scientific method.
(09:21):
You might vaguely remember that from high school,
but let's be real here.
Scientific literacy is at an all-time low,
so I am not going to assume we are starting from the right
understanding.
We often think of a scientist in terms of the experiments
they perform to answer their questions.
So I had Dr. Shodiya break this process down for us.
(09:42):
The scientific method is just that.
It's a method.
It's a procedure of starting off with a question
that you want answered and working your way to a conclusion.
And there's-- depending on who you ask,
they might say that there are five steps.
Some people say that there are seven steps.
I usually just say the first one is to observe something.
(10:03):
And so in that observation and makes you ask a question,
then you do research to figure out what is already out there
about that topic.
Then you create a hypothesis, which is a guess, essentially,
about a certain aspect of that topic and say,
I think if I do A, then B will happen.
(10:25):
Or I think if I remove A, then C will happen.
Then the next step is to test it with some type of experiment.
Once you have the results from that experiment,
then you analyze the data.
And once you analyze the data, then you
can report your conclusions.
Was your hypothesis correct?
(10:46):
Was your hypothesis incorrect?
I think one of the most exciting things about science
is that, well, it's patterned detecting, which
is kind of what I do all the time on this podcast.
And there are a couple ways of going about it,
as Dr. Elsayad explained.
Yeah, it's looking for patterns.
I guess that's part of the method.
(11:08):
And a lot of science is also equal hypothesis level,
where people have some kind of hypothesis,
and then they try to improve it, and disprove it.
And then they modify it, or come up with a new one,
depending on what the result is.
But there's also a lot of what are you
called blue sky science, where it's basically--
let's just try something and see what happens.
Then work backwards and try and explain it.
(11:30):
So I think both are part of the scientific method.
Both have their merits.
I mean, I think one needs to go ahead from both elections.
Something just occurred to me.
Let me get back to you after the break.
(12:00):
Before the break, we deconstructed the key traits
of a scientist.
No, not good looks in sparkling personality, though, of course,
my guests certainly possess those traits,
but curiosity and a willingness to experiment.
Given what Dr. Shodia had said about everybody
(12:21):
being a scientist, well, I have a hypothesis about cats.
I think they're scientists.
You know, when they test you to see what'll happen
when they knock things over, I think they're running
an experiment.
They're collecting enough data to draw conclusions.
And I'm not alone in this observation.
(12:43):
I find them very fascinating for the fact
that you can really watch them, watch you do something.
You can kind of see in their eyes that they work us all very well.
Like most of my cats have all figured out
the different ways to wake me up most efficiently in the morning
if they want some food.
Trying to figure out somehow what's going on.
(13:03):
I had a cat that once loved to watch the toilet drain
and one night I woke up to find her pawing at the toilet
handle because she was trying to figure out exactly how
to make it flush.
I've only had one cat ever try to do that,
that'll stick with me forever.
That was Dr. Greg Gbur, our third scientist of this episode.
I'm professor of Physics and Optical Science
(13:25):
at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.
I'm online as Dr. Skyskull on Twitter and a few other things.
He also literally wrote the book on Physics and Cats.
I have a couple of books out there that are popular science.
One is Falling Feelings of Fundamental Physics
and the history of falling cats and the science of it
(13:47):
and the other is invisibility on the history
and science of people trying to make things invisible.
Dr. Gbur's field is distinct to Dr. Shodiya's
and Dr. Elsayad's field.
Even though he, like them, is a physicist.
I'll leave it to him to explain his work.
Originally, I was an experimental particle physicist
(14:08):
so I was actually trying to do research
on fundamental laws of nature.
And when I reached grad school, though,
I ended up being swayed away by my future PhD advisor,
Emil Wolfen, to studying the behavior of light in optics.
As in lighting up stuff?
Optical physics is really focused on the behavior of light
(14:32):
and the applications of that to various applications, really.
So optics is really the study of how does light behave
and what can light do and what can't it do.
And nowadays, it's also evolved into how can we kind of force
light to do whatever we want it to do?
(14:54):
So how did an optical physicist come to write
about falling cats?
Light, camera, action, and cats?
Up until 1894, physicists had concluded
that when a cat starts falling, it must push off of something
to get itself spinning and rotating so it can land on its feet
(15:16):
because their argument was, if it's in free fall
and it's not rotating, it can't just spontaneously rotate.
And then a French physiologist who was doing high-speed photography
at TN Jewel's Mary presented photographs
that showed a cat falling at first without any rotation
(15:37):
and just seemingly magically flipping over
to land on its feet.
This, in fact, shocked the scientific community
at the time in one of my favorite quotes
of the era of the original discussion
at a scientific meeting was one physicist
that Professor Mary had presented them
with a paradox directly in contradiction
(16:00):
with known scientific principles.
Wait, does this have something to do
with buttered toast falling buttered side down on the ground?
Did I get that right, actually?
Well, the one thing is that people have seen, I think,
the video is hypothesizing that if you tape to cat
to a buttered piece of bread, that you
(16:22):
could kind of keep it rotating endlessly
because the cat would always want to land at its feet
and the toast would always want to land buttered side down.
The one big difference in the problem
is that the piece of toast is light enough and flat enough
that it tends to experience sort of wind resistance
as it's falling.
And the cat, on the other hand, is heavy enough
(16:45):
that there's not significant wind resistance
by the time the cat hits the ground.
And less it falls from a very big height.
Which I hope never happens ever, ever.
And we certainly discourage everybody
from at-home experimentation.
I even put in my book, please don't drop your cats
there are plenty of videos online now, so you can look it up.
Anyway, back to the physics of safely landing kitties,
(17:09):
thanks to something called the writing reflex.
So the writing reflex is all about how a cat instinctively
knows how to bend and twist its body
so that it can touch down and land properly on its feet.
What's the trick?
There are very few animals that seem to have this writing reflex.
(17:33):
So the cat's maneuver is all more about how it bends and twists
and contorts its body to achieve the desired rotation.
Here's where the photography comes in.
There were both physics questions and physiology questions
about this throughout history.
In the early physics days, around 1894,
(17:55):
what happened is high-speed photography was invented.
And at that time, people had just learned
about the idea of conservation of angular momentum.
And that's a physics law that says, basically, if one thing
twists clockwise, something else has to twist counterclockwise
to balance out.
(18:15):
There's this conservation of rotation.
High-speed photography allowed a slow-motion capture
of what cats seem to be doing mid-air naturally.
The most prominent theory nowadays about how a cat does it,
and I think it's pretty much confirmed
is what people would call the bend and twist model.
(18:38):
So we've said that there's this conservation of angular momentum
so that if something rotates clockwise,
something else has to rotate counterclockwise.
Well, the thing is with a cat, it's not a rigid body.
It can bend its body and twist to different parts
of its body in different directions.
And the most extreme way to picture the bend and twist
(19:00):
model is imagine the cat completely folds at the waist
and picture the front and back haves of its bodies
as two cylinders.
And now rotate those two cylinders in opposite directions.
And if you make a 180 degree rotation of those cylinders
and straighten out the body again,
(19:21):
the body is now going to be right side up where it was upside down.
So it's a bend of the body at the waist,
rotate the body sections in opposite directions,
180 degrees, and open up again.
And because those body sections are rotating in opposite directions,
(19:45):
the angular momentum is conserved and is all perfectly fine.
So the cat sort of naturally is figured out
how to do that rotation without needing any extra angular momentum
to do the rotation.
Neat and obviously of deep personal interest to me
(20:07):
and hopefully you dear listener that these physicists
informed by a sense of curiosity,
her sued this specific scientific investigation,
cool discovery, but how is this writing reflex relevant to humans?
At the surface, it kind of feels like fluff,
(20:27):
but this information has a wide range of practical application.
In early days of space exploration, NASA and Air Force researchers were saying,
"If a cat can flip over without having anything to push off of,
we need to be able to teach people in a weightless environment to do that."
(20:48):
Researchers have actually trained gymnasts and divers
to perform the same bend and twist maneuver.
In the most recent years, it's been all about robotics
and how can we train a robot to do what a cat does?
You know cats are more than just research subjects to scientists.
(21:13):
Cats are also great lab partners.
Suri's a new and loved his cat, Spithead,
so much that he invented the cat door.
It's not confirmed that he actually did do that
and I don't think there's any record of him having a cat,
but you know, it's plausible.
(21:34):
I kind of tracked down the story and it seems like the earliest telling of the story
that Isaac Newton invented the cat door was like probably a hundred years after he had left,
I believe it was Cambridge where he was.
So people knew the house that he had lived in and saw that the house that he had lived in
(21:56):
had a cat door and so they said, "Well Isaac Newton probably put that there."
I guess the name of the cat in the story alone shouldn't have made it past the sniff test.
But maybe he still liked cats?
I mean, could it have been a cat that jumped down from the tree?
You know, the one that the apple fell from that led to Newton's discovery of gravity?
(22:17):
Also a famous legend, there's no confirmation that it's true, but we keep telling the story
because it's a great story, so we can't say it's not true, but...
All right, forget Newton.
Who actually did like cats back then?
There are a lot of scientists who have cats and there have been famous scientists who've had cats
(22:43):
as companions too. I think the one story I remember is Edwin Hubble, who the Hubble telescope is
named after later in his life when he was getting frailer. His wife got him a cat companion who
he would always say is helping him with his work.
Ah, the cat's name was Nicholas. Nicholas, Hubble.
(23:06):
Anyone else have noticed?
There's also William Rowan Hamilton who is a giant in theoretical physicist, an Irish astronomer
in physicist and mathematician. When he was young, he was really known for his love of animals,
and he had cats and... Actually, here's a great quote from a young lady who met him and said,
(23:32):
"I never saw so polite to gentlemen as your brother. I think he would almost bow to a cat."
It was noted by a sister that he would often be seen writing mathematical notes with a kitten
or a cat on his shoulder trying to bat at the pen while he wrote.
(23:52):
I bet they were coaching him through those solutions.
In all seriousness, when you're hit in a wall after writing for hours or trying to debug that code
or do mental mass, there's nothing more helpful than talking to your cat.
Those cats were great listeners, but here's a cat who was a true lab assistant.
(24:14):
There was an optical scientist named Robert Williams Wood who lived from like 1860s and 1950s,
and one of the things that he did research-wise with spectroscopy, the breaking up of light
into different colors, he used a very long tube as a spectroscope.
So this tube was at his summer house. When they'd go there over the summer, the tube would always
(24:38):
be filled with like cobwebs from neglect, so one of the things they would do is send the family cat
down the tube just to clear out all the cobwebs by walking from one end to the other.
The glamorous life of a lab assistant
Two of the most famous scientists who loved kitties included, well,
(25:00):
Einstein, as an owl, who was a known fan of cats, and of course let's not forget
Nicola Tesla and his family cat, Macak, which means cat and Croatian. He even wrote about static
electricity in Macak's fur in a letter to the public about his work.
There are certainly more stories like this, but I ran out of time to quiz Dr. Gbur on the other
(25:25):
cat worshippers in science. Thankfully, he has a whole chapter in his book. I debated reading the
entire thing allowed in this episode, but if you like that, hit me up and we can have story time with
Captain Kitty. Anywho. I rest my case that cats and scientists have a special affinity here.
(25:47):
As we've heard, they're not only catalysts of scientific innovation, but they've been partners,
and possibly scientists themselves. Untapped potential here. I'm calling it now. The cure to the common
cold, the key to world peace, stabilizing the economy to eradicate poverty, there's a cat behind that.
(26:11):
Mark my words. Call it a hypothesis.
Friends, the fun does not stop here. While we've certainly traveled several degrees across various
subjects in science, we'll be continuing on the case of the curious cats next week, and we'll meet
our fourth scientist, whose preliminary findings have brought peace to homes far and wide.
(26:37):
I want to thank my wonderful experts, Titi Shodiya, Kareem Elsayad, and Greg Gabur.
While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs. If you'd like to learn more about them
or by their book in Dr. Gbur's case, please check out our show notes, which also include the references
and research that went into this episode. If you loved it, please do give us a top rating and a review
(27:02):
with the fun cat or science fact. And tell all your friends about 60 degrees of cats. Heel the world.
Thanks again, folks. I appreciate you. We are all scientists, and everything is connected.
60 degrees of cats is produced, written, edited, and hosted by yours truly.
(27:24):
Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B. Please subscribe to our mailing list by visiting tinyurl.com/6degreesofcats
or find us on all those social media platforms. And for my paid subscribers, you'll have access to
the extra audio with more deep dives by our experts. This and all episodes are dedicated to the
(27:46):
misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient, and the weird. And of course, all the cats we've loved and lost.
Yeah, so my most recent book is on invisibility, and even though it's not mainly focused on cats,
there was one scientific paper that came out that features an invisibility cloak, a crude cloak,
(28:13):
large enough to hide a cat in it. So I kind of worked really hard to make sure I could get that
image of a cat into my invisibility book. And I'm going to try for every book that I write in the future
to include at least one cat picture in the book.
Binky, seriously, guy.
(00:03):
This is next-level script supervision here.
Why my keyboard?
Is that really so comfortable?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome back to 6 Degrees of Cats.
A podcast about how cats have shaped our past, present,
and future.
(00:24):
Hello, party peoples.
As you know, from listening in on 6 Degrees of Cats. here,
I, Captain Kitty, have a rather curious take on the world.
And guess the heck what?
My curiosity has led me down some really
winding, surprising avenues in my life and in my mind,
(00:47):
which is perpetually littered with kitties and questions.
We have come pretty far investigating so many interesting
and surprising connections.
But still, what are the relationships among all things
(01:09):
feline and human that have yet to be discovered?
How have they affected us and how have we affected them?
Not infrequently.
When explaining this podcast, I've had a lot of people ask me,
what the--
What?
To which I've replied, is there a question in there?
(01:29):
I get it.
The questions I--
I mean, we are asking.
And the research we're doing to get to the heart of it
are actually very serious science.
Very serious.
And if you don't take that seriously,
well, I have some actual real, very serious scientists
(01:50):
on hand.
And they're going to back me up here in this very episode.
And the next one.
In an unprecedented move, we're going to break it up
into two parts.
In this episode, we'll discuss the common traits
between scientists and cats.
And how hanging around cats has led
to some serious scientific innovation.
(02:12):
Cats and science have a long history together.
And yet, all things cat are
shockingly under-documented in comparison
to other domesticated animals, like dogs, which is not only
a huge injustice to all of feline kind.
(02:36):
It's probably one of the reasons we haven't
say cured the common cold, reversed climate change,
stabilized the world economy, and solved world peace.
OK, fine.
There may be a tiny bit of hyperbole in there,
but in this episode, we'll be speaking
(02:56):
to three of the four expert scientists of this two-part series
who have helped validate my hypothesis that cats have been
and continue to be very important catalysts
of scientific innovation.
Oh, yeah, one thing.
(03:18):
Before I get too much further in,
in this episode, I am not going to talk explicitly
about vivisection or the practice of using live animals
in experimentation.
I'm all about using what we can to who mainly promote scientific
discovery, so in a future episode, we'll
be talking much more about kitties and ethics.
(03:41):
Not this one, though.
Alrighty.
Since this is a science-y episode,
I think it's important that we all get on the same page here.
Any genius can make a bold statement
with lots of jargon and throwing a few numbers,
but that doesn't make it science.
(04:02):
So let's hear from our real genius.
I don't consider myself a genius by any stretch of the imagination.
I just more so identify as somebody that's just really curious
and takes their curiosity to the next level where it's like,
I'm going to find the answer.
I think you also follow this category.
(04:22):
That's why we're here now.
Gosh, I'm slattered.
I'll take it.
But enough about me.
Back to my extremely humble expert,
I'll allow her to introduce herself.
My name is Titi Shodiya, co-host of Dope Labs Podcast,
where we show how science intersects with pop culture.
(04:43):
I actually have a PhD in mechanical engineering
and material science.
My masters and PhD are both from Duke University.
I feel like I'm more of a material scientist
than a mechanical engineer, which is--
Material science is applied chemical engineering.
You might learn about things that are happening
(05:06):
on the molecular level and understand
structures of chemicals and things like that,
but then the materials engineer will take you a step further
and say, OK, well, how does this matter in the real world?
The materials that you use to make bridges,
the materials that we use for our computer screens,
all of these things are different.
(05:28):
And a material scientist was absolutely a part of that.
And what drew Dr. Shodiya to this particular field?
I want to know how things work.
I want to know why we choose to do things a certain way,
feeling like there are still additional questions
that can be asked here.
It's in this spirit that all scientists must work
(05:49):
in order to break down an observation, a pattern,
or a plain old question they have about how something works
in the physical world into something
they can describe, measure, and most importantly.
Produce models that are predictive,
and as fundamental as possible.
So it tries to be predictive.
(06:10):
And I mean, the question of how or why I think
he can always dig deeper.
It's like the kid that always asks why.
There's always going to be another why.
That was scientist number two, dialing in from Vienna.
My name is Kareem Elsayad.
My pronouns are he-- so I work for the medical university
(06:31):
of Vienna.
And I run a lab here where we develop optical techniques,
largely, and we try to understand the physics of the human body.
And I consider myself generally a physicist.
And that become more of a biophysicist.
There's generally, study human biology
and biological systems in general.
And we study a lot of systems.
We study everything from plants and to human anatomy
(06:54):
to various organisms.
So far, we have a material scientist and a biophysicist.
And they have something kind of special and common.
Besides being guests on this podcast, obviously,
I love the comparison Dr. Elsayad made
about being like a kid.
Dr. Shodiya mentioned that as well.
(07:16):
I think even when I was a kid, I had
showed the signs that being a researcher
and a scientist was something that I could do well.
I mean, I was taking things apart in the house,
which my parents probably were not enjoying.
And constantly asking questions and not really just letting
things go and say, OK, this is just how it is.
(07:37):
Science is a great place to feed those curiosities.
Curiosity.
What's that saying again?
Oh, right.
Curiosity killed the cat.
You know what?
Let's get this out of the way right now.
It didn't actually kill the cat because that saying
isn't actually a thing.
(07:57):
According to my research.
The phrase, Curiosity killed the cat
appears to have been a mutation of a far earlier expression.
Care killed a cat.
Meaning that excessive worry, rather than inquisitiveness,
will lead to harm.
The phrase seems to have changed in the 19th century
(08:18):
when Curiosity killed the cat became
established as the more famous expression.
I think that gives us license to move forward fearlessly, cat
friends.
No harm will come to us for being inquisitive in this episode,
or my name isn't Captain Kitty, which it isn't technically,
(08:38):
but anyway.
Possessing this trait isn't just incidental.
It's a must for any good scientist.
I think Curiosity is a big one.
And this is something that we say on the show all the time.
Scientists and everything in scientists for everybody.
I feel like most people, if not all people,
(09:00):
have the capacity to be scientists,
willing to ask the questions and find reputable sources
and test things out to get to a conclusion.
Let's take a moment to review what's called the scientific method.
(09:21):
You might vaguely remember that from high school,
but let's be real here.
Scientific literacy is at an all-time low,
so I am not going to assume we are starting from the right
understanding.
We often think of a scientist in terms of the experiments
they perform to answer their questions.
So I had Dr. Shodiya break this process down for us.
(09:42):
The scientific method is just that.
It's a method.
It's a procedure of starting off with a question
that you want answered and working your way to a conclusion.
And there's-- depending on who you ask,
they might say that there are five steps.
Some people say that there are seven steps.
I usually just say the first one is to observe something.
(10:03):
And so in that observation and makes you ask a question,
then you do research to figure out what is already out there
about that topic.
Then you create a hypothesis, which is a guess, essentially,
about a certain aspect of that topic and say,
I think if I do A, then B will happen.
(10:25):
Or I think if I remove A, then C will happen.
Then the next step is to test it with some type of experiment.
Once you have the results from that experiment,
then you analyze the data.
And once you analyze the data, then you
can report your conclusions.
Was your hypothesis correct?
(10:46):
Was your hypothesis incorrect?
I think one of the most exciting things about science
is that, well, it's patterned detecting, which
is kind of what I do all the time on this podcast.
And there are a couple ways of going about it,
as Dr. Elsayad explained.
Yeah, it's looking for patterns.
I guess that's part of the method.
(11:08):
And a lot of science is also equal hypothesis level,
where people have some kind of hypothesis,
and then they try to improve it, and disprove it.
And then they modify it, or come up with a new one,
depending on what the result is.
But there's also a lot of what are you
called blue sky science, where it's basically--
let's just try something and see what happens.
Then work backwards and try and explain it.
(11:30):
So I think both are part of the scientific method.
Both have their merits.
I mean, I think one needs to go ahead from both elections.
Something just occurred to me.
Let me get back to you after the break.
(12:00):
Before the break, we deconstructed the key traits
of a scientist.
No, not good looks in sparkling personality, though, of course,
my guests certainly possess those traits,
but curiosity and a willingness to experiment.
Given what Dr. Shodia had said about everybody
(12:21):
being a scientist, well, I have a hypothesis about cats.
I think they're scientists.
You know, when they test you to see what'll happen
when they knock things over, I think they're running
an experiment.
They're collecting enough data to draw conclusions.
And I'm not alone in this observation.
(12:43):
I find them very fascinating for the fact
that you can really watch them, watch you do something.
You can kind of see in their eyes that they work us all very well.
Like most of my cats have all figured out
the different ways to wake me up most efficiently in the morning
if they want some food.
Trying to figure out somehow what's going on.
(13:03):
I had a cat that once loved to watch the toilet drain
and one night I woke up to find her pawing at the toilet
handle because she was trying to figure out exactly how
to make it flush.
I've only had one cat ever try to do that,
that'll stick with me forever.
That was Dr. Greg Gbur, our third scientist of this episode.
I'm professor of Physics and Optical Science
(13:25):
at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.
I'm online as Dr. Skyskull on Twitter and a few other things.
He also literally wrote the book on Physics and Cats.
I have a couple of books out there that are popular science.
One is Falling Feelings of Fundamental Physics
and the history of falling cats and the science of it
(13:47):
and the other is invisibility on the history
and science of people trying to make things invisible.
Dr. Gbur's field is distinct to Dr. Shodiya's
and Dr. Elsayad's field.
Even though he, like them, is a physicist.
I'll leave it to him to explain his work.
Originally, I was an experimental particle physicist
(14:08):
so I was actually trying to do research
on fundamental laws of nature.
And when I reached grad school, though,
I ended up being swayed away by my future PhD advisor,
Emil Wolfen, to studying the behavior of light in optics.
As in lighting up stuff?
Optical physics is really focused on the behavior of light
(14:32):
and the applications of that to various applications, really.
So optics is really the study of how does light behave
and what can light do and what can't it do.
And nowadays, it's also evolved into how can we kind of force
light to do whatever we want it to do?
(14:54):
So how did an optical physicist come to write
about falling cats?
Light, camera, action, and cats?
Up until 1894, physicists had concluded
that when a cat starts falling, it must push off of something
to get itself spinning and rotating so it can land on its feet
(15:16):
because their argument was, if it's in free fall
and it's not rotating, it can't just spontaneously rotate.
And then a French physiologist who was doing high-speed photography
at TN Jewel's Mary presented photographs
that showed a cat falling at first without any rotation
(15:37):
and just seemingly magically flipping over
to land on its feet.
This, in fact, shocked the scientific community
at the time in one of my favorite quotes
of the era of the original discussion
at a scientific meeting was one physicist
that Professor Mary had presented them
with a paradox directly in contradiction
(16:00):
with known scientific principles.
Wait, does this have something to do
with buttered toast falling buttered side down on the ground?
Did I get that right, actually?
Well, the one thing is that people have seen, I think,
the video is hypothesizing that if you tape to cat
to a buttered piece of bread, that you
(16:22):
could kind of keep it rotating endlessly
because the cat would always want to land at its feet
and the toast would always want to land buttered side down.
The one big difference in the problem
is that the piece of toast is light enough and flat enough
that it tends to experience sort of wind resistance
as it's falling.
And the cat, on the other hand, is heavy enough
(16:45):
that there's not significant wind resistance
by the time the cat hits the ground.
And less it falls from a very big height.
Which I hope never happens ever, ever.
And we certainly discourage everybody
from at-home experimentation.
I even put in my book, please don't drop your cats
there are plenty of videos online now, so you can look it up.
Anyway, back to the physics of safely landing kitties,
(17:09):
thanks to something called the writing reflex.
So the writing reflex is all about how a cat instinctively
knows how to bend and twist its body
so that it can touch down and land properly on its feet.
What's the trick?
There are very few animals that seem to have this writing reflex.
(17:33):
So the cat's maneuver is all more about how it bends and twists
and contorts its body to achieve the desired rotation.
Here's where the photography comes in.
There were both physics questions and physiology questions
about this throughout history.
In the early physics days, around 1894,
(17:55):
what happened is high-speed photography was invented.
And at that time, people had just learned
about the idea of conservation of angular momentum.
And that's a physics law that says, basically, if one thing
twists clockwise, something else has to twist counterclockwise
to balance out.
(18:15):
There's this conservation of rotation.
High-speed photography allowed a slow-motion capture
of what cats seem to be doing mid-air naturally.
The most prominent theory nowadays about how a cat does it,
and I think it's pretty much confirmed
is what people would call the bend and twist model.
(18:38):
So we've said that there's this conservation of angular momentum
so that if something rotates clockwise,
something else has to rotate counterclockwise.
Well, the thing is with a cat, it's not a rigid body.
It can bend its body and twist to different parts
of its body in different directions.
And the most extreme way to picture the bend and twist
(19:00):
model is imagine the cat completely folds at the waist
and picture the front and back haves of its bodies
as two cylinders.
And now rotate those two cylinders in opposite directions.
And if you make a 180 degree rotation of those cylinders
and straighten out the body again,
(19:21):
the body is now going to be right side up where it was upside down.
So it's a bend of the body at the waist,
rotate the body sections in opposite directions,
180 degrees, and open up again.
And because those body sections are rotating in opposite directions,
(19:45):
the angular momentum is conserved and is all perfectly fine.
So the cat sort of naturally is figured out
how to do that rotation without needing any extra angular momentum
to do the rotation.
Neat and obviously of deep personal interest to me
(20:07):
and hopefully you dear listener that these physicists
informed by a sense of curiosity,
her sued this specific scientific investigation,
cool discovery, but how is this writing reflex relevant to humans?
At the surface, it kind of feels like fluff,
(20:27):
but this information has a wide range of practical application.
In early days of space exploration, NASA and Air Force researchers were saying,
"If a cat can flip over without having anything to push off of,
we need to be able to teach people in a weightless environment to do that."
(20:48):
Researchers have actually trained gymnasts and divers
to perform the same bend and twist maneuver.
In the most recent years, it's been all about robotics
and how can we train a robot to do what a cat does?
You know cats are more than just research subjects to scientists.
(21:13):
Cats are also great lab partners.
Suri's a new and loved his cat, Spithead,
so much that he invented the cat door.
It's not confirmed that he actually did do that
and I don't think there's any record of him having a cat,
but you know, it's plausible.
(21:34):
I kind of tracked down the story and it seems like the earliest telling of the story
that Isaac Newton invented the cat door was like probably a hundred years after he had left,
I believe it was Cambridge where he was.
So people knew the house that he had lived in and saw that the house that he had lived in
(21:56):
had a cat door and so they said, "Well Isaac Newton probably put that there."
I guess the name of the cat in the story alone shouldn't have made it past the sniff test.
But maybe he still liked cats?
I mean, could it have been a cat that jumped down from the tree?
You know, the one that the apple fell from that led to Newton's discovery of gravity?
(22:17):
Also a famous legend, there's no confirmation that it's true, but we keep telling the story
because it's a great story, so we can't say it's not true, but...
All right, forget Newton.
Who actually did like cats back then?
There are a lot of scientists who have cats and there have been famous scientists who've had cats
(22:43):
as companions too. I think the one story I remember is Edwin Hubble, who the Hubble telescope is
named after later in his life when he was getting frailer. His wife got him a cat companion who
he would always say is helping him with his work.
Ah, the cat's name was Nicholas. Nicholas, Hubble.
(23:06):
Anyone else have noticed?
There's also William Rowan Hamilton who is a giant in theoretical physicist, an Irish astronomer
in physicist and mathematician. When he was young, he was really known for his love of animals,
and he had cats and... Actually, here's a great quote from a young lady who met him and said,
(23:32):
"I never saw so polite to gentlemen as your brother. I think he would almost bow to a cat."
It was noted by a sister that he would often be seen writing mathematical notes with a kitten
or a cat on his shoulder trying to bat at the pen while he wrote.
(23:52):
I bet they were coaching him through those solutions.
In all seriousness, when you're hit in a wall after writing for hours or trying to debug that code
or do mental mass, there's nothing more helpful than talking to your cat.
Those cats were great listeners, but here's a cat who was a true lab assistant.
(24:14):
There was an optical scientist named Robert Williams Wood who lived from like 1860s and 1950s,
and one of the things that he did research-wise with spectroscopy, the breaking up of light
into different colors, he used a very long tube as a spectroscope.
So this tube was at his summer house. When they'd go there over the summer, the tube would always
(24:38):
be filled with like cobwebs from neglect, so one of the things they would do is send the family cat
down the tube just to clear out all the cobwebs by walking from one end to the other.
The glamorous life of a lab assistant
Two of the most famous scientists who loved kitties included, well,
(25:00):
Einstein, as an owl, who was a known fan of cats, and of course let's not forget
Nicola Tesla and his family cat, Macak, which means cat and Croatian. He even wrote about static
electricity in Macak's fur in a letter to the public about his work.
There are certainly more stories like this, but I ran out of time to quiz Dr. Gbur on the other
(25:25):
cat worshippers in science. Thankfully, he has a whole chapter in his book. I debated reading the
entire thing allowed in this episode, but if you like that, hit me up and we can have story time with
Captain Kitty. Anywho. I rest my case that cats and scientists have a special affinity here.
(25:47):
As we've heard, they're not only catalysts of scientific innovation, but they've been partners,
and possibly scientists themselves. Untapped potential here. I'm calling it now. The cure to the common
cold, the key to world peace, stabilizing the economy to eradicate poverty, there's a cat behind that.
(26:11):
Mark my words. Call it a hypothesis.
Friends, the fun does not stop here. While we've certainly traveled several degrees across various
subjects in science, we'll be continuing on the case of the curious cats next week, and we'll meet
our fourth scientist, whose preliminary findings have brought peace to homes far and wide.
(26:37):
I want to thank my wonderful experts, Titi Shodiya, Kareem Elsayad, and Greg Gabur.
While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs. If you'd like to learn more about them
or by their book in Dr. Gbur's case, please check out our show notes, which also include the references
and research that went into this episode. If you loved it, please do give us a top rating and a review
(27:02):
with the fun cat or science fact. And tell all your friends about 60 degrees of cats. Heel the world.
Thanks again, folks. I appreciate you. We are all scientists, and everything is connected.
60 degrees of cats is produced, written, edited, and hosted by yours truly.
(27:24):
Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B. Please subscribe to our mailing list by visiting tinyurl.com/6degreesofcats
or find us on all those social media platforms. And for my paid subscribers, you'll have access to
the extra audio with more deep dives by our experts. This and all episodes are dedicated to the
(27:46):
misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient, and the weird. And of course, all the cats we've loved and lost.
Yeah, so my most recent book is on invisibility, and even though it's not mainly focused on cats,
there was one scientific paper that came out that features an invisibility cloak, a crude cloak,
(28:13):
large enough to hide a cat in it. So I kind of worked really hard to make sure I could get that
image of a cat into my invisibility book. And I'm going to try for every book that I write in the future
to include at least one cat picture in the book.
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