Welcome back to part two of a two-part series on cats and science on 6 Degrees of Cats, the world's #1 (and only) cat-themed culture, history and science podcast. We continue our fascinating journey with biophysicist Kareem Elsayad, Ph.D., based in Vienna, as he unveils the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and demystifies the significance of Schrodinger's cat - a thought experiment that has intrigued minds for decades.
Joining Dr. Elsayad is materials scientist Titilayo Shodiya, Ph.D., an expert familiar with the diverse states of matter, including liquid, solid, collapsed, and more, in which cats astonishingly exist.
Additionally, we are thrilled to introduce rising young researcher Kaeden Henry and co-investigator Kerry Hyde, who have employed the scientific method to conduct an innovative study that promises to ignite spirited conversations among cat owners worldwide.
Support the podcast, sign up for The Captain’s Log, the companion podcast newsletter and more here: linktr.ee/6degreesofcats.
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.
- 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.
- Kaeden Henry and Kerry Hyde are a Florida-based independent research team whose innovative science fair poster, “Does Your Cat’s B***hole Really Touch All The Surfaces In Your Home?”, gained worldwide attention in 2021 upon publication on social media.
Reference image:
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:
- Howgego, J. (n.d.). Schrödinger’s Cat. Schrödinger’s cat: A thought experiment that highlights the strangeness of quantum theory. Retrieved from https://www.newscientist.com/definition/schrodingers-cat/
- Humphreys, J. (2021, December 11). How Erwin Schrödinger indulged his “lolita complex” in Ireland. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/how-erwin-schr%C3%B6dinger-indulged-his-lolita-complex-in-ireland-1.4749204
- Myers, M. (2021, April 27). Kid’s science project centered around if a cat’s behind touches surfaces. K 104.7. Retrieved from https://k1047.com/2021/04/27/kids-science-project-centered-around-if-a-cats-behind-touches-surfaces/
- Zhu, A. (2022, July 11). The Ig Nobel Prize: Why are Cats Liquid? Retrieved from https://stemfellowship.org/the-ig-nobel-prize-why-are- cats-liquid/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Interesting.
(00:01):
According to my data, you might be a lefty.
(upbeat music)
Welcome back to 6 Degrees of Cats.
A podcast about how cats have shaped our past, present,
and future.
Hello, hello, wonderful people.
(00:23):
It's me.
I'm Amanda B., AKA Captain Kitty.
As you know, here on 6 Degrees of Cats
we like to keep it fresh if you didn't know you know.
And I welcome you back to this special two-part series
exploring the many degrees of connection among cats and...
(upbeat music)
Science.
Since that last episode, I can't tell you
(00:45):
how many hypotheses about the world and cats
that I've come up with.
Thousands.
They haunt me.
They keep me up at night.
It's, it's actually becoming a bit of a problem.
Is this how mad scientists get their start?
Behind every good scientist, mad, glad, sad, or, uh,
(01:09):
rad is a research team, which has often included
a cat or three.
And in the first part of the series,
we clarified a few things about that, such as...
How scientists channel that curiosity
to investigate some of their pressing questions.
And you know what they say about curiosity and cats,
(01:31):
which isn't actually true.
We also identified cats as highly qualified
principal investigators themselves.
Mine have been teaching themselves to extract food
from a cat maze, for example,
and as you heard earlier,
looks like Binky is a lefty, worth investigation.
(01:52):
We also heard about how these very little magical critters
have helped us mitigate angular momentum
with their writing reflex, which apparently helps gymnasts.
I think this makes the case for the US Gymnastics team
to rebrand with tiger stripes in their costume.
What do you think?
No?
(02:13):
In this episode, part two of our series on cats and science,
we're going to lean into the mad science part of this topic.
The whimsical, the wondrous, and the weird,
starring, you guessed it, cats,
kind of like this podcast.
And just as with part one, don't you worry.
(02:36):
I am not going anywhere near studies or research
that has involved vivisection,
or surgical experimentation on animals.
Buckle up.
In part one, we explored science that one might say
has more immediate relevance and impact
on our human daily lives.
(02:57):
Of course, cats have factored heavily
into scientific discovery in those domains.
There is also, however,
the other domain in science,
which is one of the more fascinating avenues,
the one that stretches the old imagination a bit
and definitely taps into that curiosity.
I'm talking about the realm of the theoretical,
(03:20):
the micro or macroscopic stuff that are five senses,
or six, depending on what you believe,
cannot synthesize holistically into our perception
of reality.
It's just too vast, too complex, too abstract.
Like mental math.
In that theoretical realm, there also lives cats.
(03:44):
Well, sort of.
I'm talking about shrodinger's cat.
Ringabell.
First off, shrodinger,
Ernst Shrodinger was not a very nice guy.
See my show notes for that context?
Who happened to do a lot of important and influential work
in the field of physics in the early 20th century?
(04:06):
He didn't actually have a cat,
but he's associated with this concept of a cat in a box
that is both alive and dead at the same time,
and physics.
That's all I got.
In all seriousness, I'm glad to have a much more qualified person
to explain more about this concept.
(04:28):
That would be returning expert Dr. Kareem Elsayad,
who oversees microscopy at Austria's Vienna Biocenter Core
Facilities.
On a side note.
- Ruedinger actually worked in the building
right now in the corner from here.
In the university,
to sort of concentrate in this small area.
- Must be in the water.
Anyway, we're going to talk about quantum mechanics,
(04:51):
which is...
- Quantum mechanics is all this study of the quantum light.
- Okay, a quantum of light.
So far, so good.
- What you have in quantum mechanics here,
if something could have wave function,
and this is basically an equation,
it can be anything, there's a description
of the state of a system.
It contains ideally all the properties of the system,
(05:14):
and it does not contain any observables
until it actually collapses.
And what that means is that wave function
can describe multiple system states,
but then by operating on it, if you will,
this could be the looking at it,
feeling it, feeling the object.
You cause it to collapse into a single state.
(05:36):
Before it does this,
the system is not in a certain state, in a defined state.
So before the collapse, which is caused by some sort of interaction,
the wave is not in a defined state.
So the waves we see are collapsed.
- I think, kinda got it.
- There's a quiz at the end of this.
(05:56):
- Just kidding.
- What's really standing out to me is,
well, remember how in part one,
we talked about the scientific method,
and how one aspect of it includes the ability to predict things?
Dr. Elsaiad and I had a good chuckle together
as fellow scientists over here.
(06:17):
- Yeah, that's actually interesting,
because that's the general problem with quantum mechanics.
You're kind of designing a predictive theory
that by nature says everything is unpredictable.
But you're not really saying it's unpredictable.
You're saying that the observable,
or the unpredictable,
is still the final, very sort of clear wave function.
Basically, the nature of quantum mechanics
(06:39):
is that he don't really have
his full deterministic picture.
But he's still making laws and predictions,
but this time about how unpredictable it is,
or limits to that.
- And that is probably where science ends
and philosophy begins.
Back to cats and Schrodinger, and the box.
(07:02):
Can't forget that.
- The idea of Schrodinger's cat is that,
he said, like, imagine you have a cat in a box,
and you also have a radioactive source in that box.
And the way a radioactivity works is it
emits, it emits scamilase, it emits them spontaneously,
which means it essentially emits them at random.
(07:23):
So it could emit it now, but it could also emit it later,
it has a certain half-life and so forth,
but you can never tell exactly when the radiation
or a given fault on his emitting.
But you know that this radiation source is strong enough
to actually kill the cat when it does emit radiation.
So the question is now you have this box,
you have this cat in it, the cat's alive.
(07:43):
You have this radiation source in there.
And it just randomly emits, you don't know exactly
when it emits, and you're not allowed to look in the box.
The box is completely sealed from you,
you can't hear from anything from the box,
you have no physical interaction
of knowing what's actually going inside the box.
The question is at any point in time,
would you know if the cat is dead or alive?
(08:05):
Because if it did emit this radiation source
and the cat would have died, it didn't emit,
then the cat would still be alive.
But you have no way of knowing if it emit it or not
because it's this spontaneous process that happens at random.
So his arguments said that until you actually observe the cat,
their cat is both dead and alive.
(08:26):
Or it's neither dead or neither alive.
In other words, the wave function has not yet collapsed.
It is not in a physical state yet,
where you can say that it's dead or alive.
This is the shortening of the cat.
I'd heard of shortingers cat described in the context
of more existential stuff, questioning if anything
(08:47):
about our reality can truly be assumed.
But...
This has been taken a little bit out of context
and misinterpreted in some ways.
It's not really a dilemma.
It was just a simple way of explaining, I think,
what the collapse of a wave function is
and that if we actually collapse is, you know, in a fixed state.
(09:10):
And that's it. I mean, I don't think there's anything extremely complex about it.
I think he just created it back in the '30s
as a way to explain to students in a very simple way
that collapse of quantum states.
OK, got it.
It's all about gamma rays.
So...
(09:31):
Why a cat earns... why?
Why not a clown or an elf or a baby?
So using a baby or a human would just seem cool, you know?
I mean, that would just seem like why you were thinking about that, you know?
It wouldn't be very good for physics, because, you know,
it sounds like, you know, we actually want to do this experiments now.
(09:52):
And then, yeah, so I think that's sort of an image thing.
Yeah, he has a point.
That would not have been...
Good optics.
Dr. Elsai had with saying...
(10:30):
Maybe like the rest of us, Schrodinger noticed that cats and boxes are a thing.
Since it sounds like the actual object in the box is relatively trivial, I say...
It's a clown. Schrodinger's clown.
(10:50):
Quantum physics, really interesting stuff,
and very applicable to important work in understanding things
at a very theoretical level.
How about real cats and theoretical physics?
Well, get this.
Cats are more liquid than we realized.
(11:15):
Oh yes, that's right.
We're going to talk more about this after the break.
[Music]
Before the break, we talked about cats, boxes, and lasers.
(11:38):
Well, gamma rays.
As in, Schrodinger's cat.
I'm choosing to believe that the cat is alive in there,
and that any cat in any box is there by choice.
Moving along, let's think about living cats and vessels other than boxes.
Have you ever noticed how cats truly can squeeze themselves into small spaces?
(12:03):
I'm talking about glasses, vases, and other seemingly improbable places
that only a liquid belongs.
How the heck do they do that?
Well, let's go back to physics.
I think we need to get a handle on what exactly we're talking about
with liquid versus solid states.
(12:24):
Thankfully, we still have Dr. Elsayad on the line.
So, really, we want to understand what states the body can be in from a material perspective,
because it obviously exists in lots of different phases.
So, some of you's liquid, some of you's solid,
but most of you's something weirdly in between,
and it's really that's weirdly in between thing that actually makes you alive.
(12:47):
If you wouldn't be able to transition
microscopically between solid and liquid,
well, you know, you just be wax-figured basically.
So, it's really time to understand this dynamic structure is what we call a transient structure,
which actually sort of defines life.
Cool. Humans and cats are a transient structure.
(13:12):
Amusingly, someone took that a step further.
That would be 2017 Ignoble Award winner Marc-Antoine Fardin,
a researcher of reality at L'Université Paris-Diderot.
Dr. Elsayad helped me understand this study.
He actually read the paper.
I think that he just took pictures of the internet of cats in different vessels.
(13:40):
Basically, the cats take the form of the vessel, which made him conclude that,
to some extent, they're liquid because liquids are defined as materials which take the form of the
container.
And I think he even worked out the mechanical relaxation time of cats,
and he concluded that to some extent liquid,
(14:02):
well, everything is liquid to some extent, but the surprisingly liquid.
I remember even reading this paper at one point.
I mean, he was really treating it as a pure physical system and working out all these parameters
that we use to actually define material properties.
And he worked out his sister, they slow,
viscous relaxation time.
I think he even projected to other feelings if I remember correctly.
(14:26):
Since we're talking about material properties, let's check in with our materials
scientist Dr. Titilayo Shodiya, who we heard from in part one.
They're talking about the reality.
So, reality is how things flow, the flow of a liquid or a solid.
(14:48):
Like, even the glass in our windows, if you were to leave it for, you know, a thousand years,
it would eventually start to sag because glass is liquid.
I can see by some stretch of the imagination, because, you know, I've picked up a cat or two,
and they are pretty floppy when they let you pick them up.
How we can get to that conclusion, because it, I mean, they're very slinky and, you know,
(15:12):
sometimes they can fit through things that you feel like it's impossible for them to get through.
How do they do that?
Obviously, this is a great personal interest to myself and hopefully you,
but about this paper and this author's investigation.
Does it actually have practical application?
He's semi-convincingly argued that it was not a useless endeavor, and it's a long paper.
(15:38):
It's not sort of just a page.
I tried to check out the paper myself and I got a little lost in the details.
I think there's something about a Deborah number.
That would be a great band name out there.
That's named Deborah.
And then I got curious about that.
I like stuff like this where it's you kind of think outside of the box a little bit.
It definitely stokes curiosity and ends unto itself.
(16:01):
We've learned about the scientific method and appreciated how observing cats
has led to discoveries about various fundamental laws in physics.
We've also somehow wandered into quantum mechanics and the field of
"Rheology," which until this episode I'd never heard of.
(16:23):
Now let's bring it all home and hear about how cats
have been an actual investigative variable in a "humane" experiment that made the headlines.
And you'll come to find "has practical every day"
application to our lives.
Before we get into our final investigation, a slight content warning ahead.
(16:49):
You'll hear the word "butthole" quite frequently because it will come up.
I just couldn't find a way around it.
Even if you use more clinical words, we're talking about that region of the body,
which is a little impolite to talk about in conversation, so I get it.
And I won't be offended if you skip ahead about 10 minutes,
(17:11):
but you'll be missing out on some very serious science.
Very serious.
Anywho, I'm excited to introduce our fourth scientist of this two-part science series,
whose work in public health has revolutionized discourse in the world of domestic relations
(17:32):
among feline and humankind. His abstract poster, which was presented in a small virtual
scientific conference in 2021, made such a splash that news outlets across the world,
such as mental floss, nervous, and even late-night television covered it.
The unique, pressing scientific question posed by the poster's very descriptive title was...
(17:56):
I'll let the principal investigator introduce himself.
I'm Kaden and I do like games here in there, and mostly I'm a cat first because you have this cat
taco who is a popular project. He's an interesting cat for the house, really, so I like to be put
(18:22):
to the moon. At the time of this interview, Kaeden was in sixth grade. I had the honor of interviewing
Kaeden and his supervisor, who also happens to be his mom, Kerry.
I'm a certified humane educator, but then I got a doctorate in animal behavior.
The technical name is "Athology," but if I say "Athology," a lot of people don't know what that is,
(18:47):
so I just say animal behavior, and then they know. And my concentration was obviously in cats.
I was the queen of solving litter box problems. That was my specialty.
Science runs in the family, clearly. And given Carrie's specialty, Kaden was well-primed for this
investigation relevant to the anatomy involved in litter box problems. You may be wondering,
(19:09):
how did this all get started? This kind of started as a joke, I guess. There's a little meme,
and there's like four boxes, and there's a cat in each one of the boxes has like a picture of your home,
and it says one thing you have to come to terms with being cat owner is knowing that your cat's
butthole has touched every surface in your home. We were kind of like, "That's probably true!"
(19:35):
And then nothing was really said for a while. We just have our two kiddies now, Maya and Taco,
and my husband is kind of funny about cats being on furniture, so the more we started thinking about it,
we really started to genuinely wonder, do they really touch everything, and then the science
(19:56):
fair just kind of got brought up, and we were like, "Let's do it! Let's find out!"
So how does one go about documenting where cats, booties have made physical contact with a surface?
Let's just say, very creative use of cosmetics. Pucker up?
(20:16):
I was the one who came up with the lipstick part. I was like, "I think that's safe enough,
and I think we can get results with that, so we'll give it a try." And Kaden took it from there.
I think the biggest obstacle was trying to figure out what we could put that would not be toxic,
(20:38):
not, you know, be distressing to the cats to actually determine this.
And here's how they set up the lab.
Taco got red lipstick. Maya got pink lipstick, so we would know who left what spots,
because we were expecting a lot of spots. We laid a white flat sheet across the bed,
(21:00):
and we put some pieces of white paper on like the nightstand, and then on the floor.
The lipstick came from Dollar Tree because we wanted something that was cheap and would smear
easily. And so Kaeden called them in, gave them treats. I just real quick, lifted the tail,
applied lipstick real fast, and they, you know, walked off because obviously they felt something.
(21:21):
It was like, "What is that?" And how did they run that experiment again?
We let them just walk around the room. We picked them up, put them on the bed, and then Kaden had
the treats, and he was telling them to sit or stand up or lay down, and we were just watching
as they would sit, and then when they would bring their bottom back up, was there any marks or anything?
(21:45):
[Music]
Okay folks, the time has come.
Do cats' buttholes touch every surface of your home?
That's a possibility that your cat's butt is not truly touch almost everything.
(22:05):
Okay, slightly reassuring. Any key variables of which to be aware?
Hair has everything to do with it. The denser the hair, the longer the hair, that seems to be
your safest bet. The shorter hair cats might touch a few things. We had quite a few people who chimed in
(22:31):
on multiple sites and pages and shares. People who had hairless cats promised me for sure that their cats
actually leave little pucker marks on like coffee tables and end tables. They were like, "Oh yes,
buttholes are definitely touching in our house. We have hard solid evidence of it."
(22:51):
Kerry helped us understand some of the remaining limitations on the findings.
We did see a slight smear on the flat sheet and that was on Taco. He had the shorter hair.
To be quite honest, there's a video on my original Facebook post and you can see in the video of
(23:17):
taco when he gets up off the nightstand where lipstick goes on the hair. So that could have been a fault
of ours. We'll definitely have to redo it at some point and update our findings.
Thus continues the cycle of science. The work continues as Dr. Shodiya explained.
It's an endless loop, the scientific method because once you have conclusions, you can then again
(23:44):
make another observation and ask another question and then research more and then come up with another
hypothesis and then test that and then analyze that data and then come up with another conclusion.
Since publication, there have already been reports of positive public health impact
affirmed by corresponding author Kerry. This really brought a lot of peace to a lot of homes.
(24:07):
Sometimes there's one partner that is kind of concerned about bacteria, you know, different
things that the cat might be carrying and being on their pillow and things like that. So I told
if this is really good stuff, be very proud of what you did. I concur. I see bright things for
(24:28):
cadence, scientific career. Should he continue along that specific path? And well, I guess it's for
the best that thinking snuggles sleep in other rooms than me, even though that makes me very sad.
Our principal investigator leaves us with these parting words.
I would probably have people realize that you shouldn't just look at a cat and go like, oh yeah,
(24:52):
I'm just gonna look at this cat. I'm just gonna see what touches everything. I would like people to
actually think about it, all the hair that's in the way and how the cat actually sits and all that.
As Kerry and Kaeden and found, you can rest assured that unless you have a hairless cat,
(25:13):
pending further research, the entirety of your home is not in fact in need of a visit from
the health department. Or if it is, it's more likely because of your guest stove. Not your cat.
Check your carbon monoxide alarms, folks. And use enzyme cleaners not bleach for biostains.
(25:34):
Alrighty. All of the questions raised in these past two episodes are effectively to be continued.
Going back to Dr. Shodiya here. Science never stops. There is no scientific question that you could
put a period at the end of the sentence and say, that's it, we're done. Everything is finished here.
(25:55):
How can we possibly say this is all there is when so much has yet to be uncovered and explored?
How can we say we know all we need to know about cats? Hence this podcast in which I guess you could say,
I'm something of a scientist myself. Or I just play one on TV. Once someone picks this up and
(26:21):
hires me to go on a world tour about cats. From here on out, that's Dr. Captain Kitty. I think that's
how that works. I've been happy to have you along as we've traveled several degrees across various
subjects in science here. Thus concludes our two-part series on science. My conclusion?
(26:43):
Curiosity did not kill the cat. Possibly gamma rays did. But given that cats are possibly
mostly liquid and are exceptionally agile, perhaps we can conclude that Schrodinger's cat
found a corner to slide out of the box entirely and land on its two feet. Ah, cats and science. Boy,
(27:06):
they've certainly left their paw or puckers shaped imprints all over the history of science.
And that's not all they've walked or sat on while we've tried to work.
What's that about 15th century manuscripts with cat pee and paw prints all over them?
Was it personal? Was it a critique of a terrible score? Tune in next time to find out.
(27:31):
I want to thank my wonderful experts Kareem Elsayad, Titi Shodiyaa. And Kaeden and his mom, Kerry.
While the opinions are my own, the research and the work is theirs. If you'd like to learn more about
them, please check out our show notes, which also include the references and research that went into
this episode. If you loved it, please leave us a five star rating and a review and share it with
(27:54):
someone who needs more curiosity in their life. Thanks again, folks. I appreciate you. We're all in
this together. My hypothesis? Everything is connected.
Six degrees of cats is produced, written, edited and hosted by yours,
truly. Captain Keri, aka Amanda B. Please subscribe to our mailing list by visiting tinyurl.com/six
(28:22):
degrees of cats 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 misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient, and the weird. And of course,
(28:43):
all the cats we've loved and lost.
The next time you see your cat dangling from your curtain, well, maybe they are absolutely liquid.
This cat is liquid.
Interesting.
(00:01):
According to my data, you might be a lefty.
(upbeat music)
Welcome back to 6 Degrees of Cats.
A podcast about how cats have shaped our past, present,
and future.
Hello, hello, wonderful people.
(00:23):
It's me.
I'm Amanda B., AKA Captain Kitty.
As you know, here on 6 Degrees of Cats
we like to keep it fresh if you didn't know you know.
And I welcome you back to this special two-part series
exploring the many degrees of connection among cats and...
(upbeat music)
Science.
Since that last episode, I can't tell you
(00:45):
how many hypotheses about the world and cats
that I've come up with.
Thousands.
They haunt me.
They keep me up at night.
It's, it's actually becoming a bit of a problem.
Is this how mad scientists get their start?
Behind every good scientist, mad, glad, sad, or, uh,
(01:09):
rad is a research team, which has often included
a cat or three.
And in the first part of the series,
we clarified a few things about that, such as...
How scientists channel that curiosity
to investigate some of their pressing questions.
And you know what they say about curiosity and cats,
(01:31):
which isn't actually true.
We also identified cats as highly qualified
principal investigators themselves.
Mine have been teaching themselves to extract food
from a cat maze, for example,
and as you heard earlier,
looks like Binky is a lefty, worth investigation.
(01:52):
We also heard about how these very little magical critters
have helped us mitigate angular momentum
with their writing reflex, which apparently helps gymnasts.
I think this makes the case for the US Gymnastics team
to rebrand with tiger stripes in their costume.
What do you think?
No?
(02:13):
In this episode, part two of our series on cats and science,
we're going to lean into the mad science part of this topic.
The whimsical, the wondrous, and the weird,
starring, you guessed it, cats,
kind of like this podcast.
And just as with part one, don't you worry.
(02:36):
I am not going anywhere near studies or research
that has involved vivisection,
or surgical experimentation on animals.
Buckle up.
In part one, we explored science that one might say
has more immediate relevance and impact
on our human daily lives.
(02:57):
Of course, cats have factored heavily
into scientific discovery in those domains.
There is also, however,
the other domain in science,
which is one of the more fascinating avenues,
the one that stretches the old imagination a bit
and definitely taps into that curiosity.
I'm talking about the realm of the theoretical,
(03:20):
the micro or macroscopic stuff that are five senses,
or six, depending on what you believe,
cannot synthesize holistically into our perception
of reality.
It's just too vast, too complex, too abstract.
Like mental math.
In that theoretical realm, there also lives cats.
(03:44):
Well, sort of.
I'm talking about shrodinger's cat.
Ringabell.
First off, shrodinger,
Ernst Shrodinger was not a very nice guy.
See my show notes for that context?
Who happened to do a lot of important and influential work
in the field of physics in the early 20th century?
(04:06):
He didn't actually have a cat,
but he's associated with this concept of a cat in a box
that is both alive and dead at the same time,
and physics.
That's all I got.
In all seriousness, I'm glad to have a much more qualified person
to explain more about this concept.
(04:28):
That would be returning expert Dr. Kareem Elsayad,
who oversees microscopy at Austria's Vienna Biocenter Core
Facilities.
On a side note.
- Ruedinger actually worked in the building
right now in the corner from here.
In the university,
to sort of concentrate in this small area.
- Must be in the water.
Anyway, we're going to talk about quantum mechanics,
(04:51):
which is...
- Quantum mechanics is all this study of the quantum light.
- Okay, a quantum of light.
So far, so good.
- What you have in quantum mechanics here,
if something could have wave function,
and this is basically an equation,
it can be anything, there's a description
of the state of a system.
It contains ideally all the properties of the system,
(05:14):
and it does not contain any observables
until it actually collapses.
And what that means is that wave function
can describe multiple system states,
but then by operating on it, if you will,
this could be the looking at it,
feeling it, feeling the object.
You cause it to collapse into a single state.
(05:36):
Before it does this,
the system is not in a certain state, in a defined state.
So before the collapse, which is caused by some sort of interaction,
the wave is not in a defined state.
So the waves we see are collapsed.
- I think, kinda got it.
- There's a quiz at the end of this.
(05:56):
- Just kidding.
- What's really standing out to me is,
well, remember how in part one,
we talked about the scientific method,
and how one aspect of it includes the ability to predict things?
Dr. Elsaiad and I had a good chuckle together
as fellow scientists over here.
(06:17):
- Yeah, that's actually interesting,
because that's the general problem with quantum mechanics.
You're kind of designing a predictive theory
that by nature says everything is unpredictable.
But you're not really saying it's unpredictable.
You're saying that the observable,
or the unpredictable,
is still the final, very sort of clear wave function.
Basically, the nature of quantum mechanics
(06:39):
is that he don't really have
his full deterministic picture.
But he's still making laws and predictions,
but this time about how unpredictable it is,
or limits to that.
- And that is probably where science ends
and philosophy begins.
Back to cats and Schrodinger, and the box.
(07:02):
Can't forget that.
- The idea of Schrodinger's cat is that,
he said, like, imagine you have a cat in a box,
and you also have a radioactive source in that box.
And the way a radioactivity works is it
emits, it emits scamilase, it emits them spontaneously,
which means it essentially emits them at random.
(07:23):
So it could emit it now, but it could also emit it later,
it has a certain half-life and so forth,
but you can never tell exactly when the radiation
or a given fault on his emitting.
But you know that this radiation source is strong enough
to actually kill the cat when it does emit radiation.
So the question is now you have this box,
you have this cat in it, the cat's alive.
(07:43):
You have this radiation source in there.
And it just randomly emits, you don't know exactly
when it emits, and you're not allowed to look in the box.
The box is completely sealed from you,
you can't hear from anything from the box,
you have no physical interaction
of knowing what's actually going inside the box.
The question is at any point in time,
would you know if the cat is dead or alive?
(08:05):
Because if it did emit this radiation source
and the cat would have died, it didn't emit,
then the cat would still be alive.
But you have no way of knowing if it emit it or not
because it's this spontaneous process that happens at random.
So his arguments said that until you actually observe the cat,
their cat is both dead and alive.
(08:26):
Or it's neither dead or neither alive.
In other words, the wave function has not yet collapsed.
It is not in a physical state yet,
where you can say that it's dead or alive.
This is the shortening of the cat.
I'd heard of shortingers cat described in the context
of more existential stuff, questioning if anything
(08:47):
about our reality can truly be assumed.
But...
This has been taken a little bit out of context
and misinterpreted in some ways.
It's not really a dilemma.
It was just a simple way of explaining, I think,
what the collapse of a wave function is
and that if we actually collapse is, you know, in a fixed state.
(09:10):
And that's it. I mean, I don't think there's anything extremely complex about it.
I think he just created it back in the '30s
as a way to explain to students in a very simple way
that collapse of quantum states.
OK, got it.
It's all about gamma rays.
So...
(09:31):
Why a cat earns... why?
Why not a clown or an elf or a baby?
So using a baby or a human would just seem cool, you know?
I mean, that would just seem like why you were thinking about that, you know?
It wouldn't be very good for physics, because, you know,
it sounds like, you know, we actually want to do this experiments now.
(09:52):
And then, yeah, so I think that's sort of an image thing.
Yeah, he has a point.
That would not have been...
Good optics.
Dr. Elsai had with saying...
(10:30):
Maybe like the rest of us, Schrodinger noticed that cats and boxes are a thing.
Since it sounds like the actual object in the box is relatively trivial, I say...
It's a clown. Schrodinger's clown.
(10:50):
Quantum physics, really interesting stuff,
and very applicable to important work in understanding things
at a very theoretical level.
How about real cats and theoretical physics?
Well, get this.
Cats are more liquid than we realized.
(11:15):
Oh yes, that's right.
We're going to talk more about this after the break.
[Music]
Before the break, we talked about cats, boxes, and lasers.
(11:38):
Well, gamma rays.
As in, Schrodinger's cat.
I'm choosing to believe that the cat is alive in there,
and that any cat in any box is there by choice.
Moving along, let's think about living cats and vessels other than boxes.
Have you ever noticed how cats truly can squeeze themselves into small spaces?
(12:03):
I'm talking about glasses, vases, and other seemingly improbable places
that only a liquid belongs.
How the heck do they do that?
Well, let's go back to physics.
I think we need to get a handle on what exactly we're talking about
with liquid versus solid states.
(12:24):
Thankfully, we still have Dr. Elsayad on the line.
So, really, we want to understand what states the body can be in from a material perspective,
because it obviously exists in lots of different phases.
So, some of you's liquid, some of you's solid,
but most of you's something weirdly in between,
and it's really that's weirdly in between thing that actually makes you alive.
(12:47):
If you wouldn't be able to transition
microscopically between solid and liquid,
well, you know, you just be wax-figured basically.
So, it's really time to understand this dynamic structure is what we call a transient structure,
which actually sort of defines life.
Cool. Humans and cats are a transient structure.
(13:12):
Amusingly, someone took that a step further.
That would be 2017 Ignoble Award winner Marc-Antoine Fardin,
a researcher of reality at L'Université Paris-Diderot.
Dr. Elsayad helped me understand this study.
He actually read the paper.
I think that he just took pictures of the internet of cats in different vessels.
(13:40):
Basically, the cats take the form of the vessel, which made him conclude that,
to some extent, they're liquid because liquids are defined as materials which take the form of the
container.
And I think he even worked out the mechanical relaxation time of cats,
and he concluded that to some extent liquid,
(14:02):
well, everything is liquid to some extent, but the surprisingly liquid.
I remember even reading this paper at one point.
I mean, he was really treating it as a pure physical system and working out all these parameters
that we use to actually define material properties.
And he worked out his sister, they slow,
viscous relaxation time.
I think he even projected to other feelings if I remember correctly.
(14:26):
Since we're talking about material properties, let's check in with our materials
scientist Dr. Titilayo Shodiya, who we heard from in part one.
They're talking about the reality.
So, reality is how things flow, the flow of a liquid or a solid.
(14:48):
Like, even the glass in our windows, if you were to leave it for, you know, a thousand years,
it would eventually start to sag because glass is liquid.
I can see by some stretch of the imagination, because, you know, I've picked up a cat or two,
and they are pretty floppy when they let you pick them up.
How we can get to that conclusion, because it, I mean, they're very slinky and, you know,
(15:12):
sometimes they can fit through things that you feel like it's impossible for them to get through.
How do they do that?
Obviously, this is a great personal interest to myself and hopefully you,
but about this paper and this author's investigation.
Does it actually have practical application?
He's semi-convincingly argued that it was not a useless endeavor, and it's a long paper.
(15:38):
It's not sort of just a page.
I tried to check out the paper myself and I got a little lost in the details.
I think there's something about a Deborah number.
That would be a great band name out there.
That's named Deborah.
And then I got curious about that.
I like stuff like this where it's you kind of think outside of the box a little bit.
It definitely stokes curiosity and ends unto itself.
(16:01):
We've learned about the scientific method and appreciated how observing cats
has led to discoveries about various fundamental laws in physics.
We've also somehow wandered into quantum mechanics and the field of
"Rheology," which until this episode I'd never heard of.
(16:23):
Now let's bring it all home and hear about how cats
have been an actual investigative variable in a "humane" experiment that made the headlines.
And you'll come to find "has practical every day"
application to our lives.
Before we get into our final investigation, a slight content warning ahead.
(16:49):
You'll hear the word "butthole" quite frequently because it will come up.
I just couldn't find a way around it.
Even if you use more clinical words, we're talking about that region of the body,
which is a little impolite to talk about in conversation, so I get it.
And I won't be offended if you skip ahead about 10 minutes,
(17:11):
but you'll be missing out on some very serious science.
Very serious.
Anywho, I'm excited to introduce our fourth scientist of this two-part science series,
whose work in public health has revolutionized discourse in the world of domestic relations
(17:32):
among feline and humankind. His abstract poster, which was presented in a small virtual
scientific conference in 2021, made such a splash that news outlets across the world,
such as mental floss, nervous, and even late-night television covered it.
The unique, pressing scientific question posed by the poster's very descriptive title was...
(17:56):
I'll let the principal investigator introduce himself.
I'm Kaden and I do like games here in there, and mostly I'm a cat first because you have this cat
taco who is a popular project. He's an interesting cat for the house, really, so I like to be put
(18:22):
to the moon. At the time of this interview, Kaeden was in sixth grade. I had the honor of interviewing
Kaeden and his supervisor, who also happens to be his mom, Kerry.
I'm a certified humane educator, but then I got a doctorate in animal behavior.
The technical name is "Athology," but if I say "Athology," a lot of people don't know what that is,
(18:47):
so I just say animal behavior, and then they know. And my concentration was obviously in cats.
I was the queen of solving litter box problems. That was my specialty.
Science runs in the family, clearly. And given Carrie's specialty, Kaden was well-primed for this
investigation relevant to the anatomy involved in litter box problems. You may be wondering,
(19:09):
how did this all get started? This kind of started as a joke, I guess. There's a little meme,
and there's like four boxes, and there's a cat in each one of the boxes has like a picture of your home,
and it says one thing you have to come to terms with being cat owner is knowing that your cat's
butthole has touched every surface in your home. We were kind of like, "That's probably true!"
(19:35):
And then nothing was really said for a while. We just have our two kiddies now, Maya and Taco,
and my husband is kind of funny about cats being on furniture, so the more we started thinking about it,
we really started to genuinely wonder, do they really touch everything, and then the science
(19:56):
fair just kind of got brought up, and we were like, "Let's do it! Let's find out!"
So how does one go about documenting where cats, booties have made physical contact with a surface?
Let's just say, very creative use of cosmetics. Pucker up?
(20:16):
I was the one who came up with the lipstick part. I was like, "I think that's safe enough,
and I think we can get results with that, so we'll give it a try." And Kaden took it from there.
I think the biggest obstacle was trying to figure out what we could put that would not be toxic,
(20:38):
not, you know, be distressing to the cats to actually determine this.
And here's how they set up the lab.
Taco got red lipstick. Maya got pink lipstick, so we would know who left what spots,
because we were expecting a lot of spots. We laid a white flat sheet across the bed,
(21:00):
and we put some pieces of white paper on like the nightstand, and then on the floor.
The lipstick came from Dollar Tree because we wanted something that was cheap and would smear
easily. And so Kaeden called them in, gave them treats. I just real quick, lifted the tail,
applied lipstick real fast, and they, you know, walked off because obviously they felt something.
(21:21):
It was like, "What is that?" And how did they run that experiment again?
We let them just walk around the room. We picked them up, put them on the bed, and then Kaden had
the treats, and he was telling them to sit or stand up or lay down, and we were just watching
as they would sit, and then when they would bring their bottom back up, was there any marks or anything?
(21:45):
[Music]
Okay folks, the time has come.
Do cats' buttholes touch every surface of your home?
That's a possibility that your cat's butt is not truly touch almost everything.
(22:05):
Okay, slightly reassuring. Any key variables of which to be aware?
Hair has everything to do with it. The denser the hair, the longer the hair, that seems to be
your safest bet. The shorter hair cats might touch a few things. We had quite a few people who chimed in
(22:31):
on multiple sites and pages and shares. People who had hairless cats promised me for sure that their cats
actually leave little pucker marks on like coffee tables and end tables. They were like, "Oh yes,
buttholes are definitely touching in our house. We have hard solid evidence of it."
(22:51):
Kerry helped us understand some of the remaining limitations on the findings.
We did see a slight smear on the flat sheet and that was on Taco. He had the shorter hair.
To be quite honest, there's a video on my original Facebook post and you can see in the video of
(23:17):
taco when he gets up off the nightstand where lipstick goes on the hair. So that could have been a fault
of ours. We'll definitely have to redo it at some point and update our findings.
Thus continues the cycle of science. The work continues as Dr. Shodiya explained.
It's an endless loop, the scientific method because once you have conclusions, you can then again
(23:44):
make another observation and ask another question and then research more and then come up with another
hypothesis and then test that and then analyze that data and then come up with another conclusion.
Since publication, there have already been reports of positive public health impact
affirmed by corresponding author Kerry. This really brought a lot of peace to a lot of homes.
(24:07):
Sometimes there's one partner that is kind of concerned about bacteria, you know, different
things that the cat might be carrying and being on their pillow and things like that. So I told
if this is really good stuff, be very proud of what you did. I concur. I see bright things for
(24:28):
cadence, scientific career. Should he continue along that specific path? And well, I guess it's for
the best that thinking snuggles sleep in other rooms than me, even though that makes me very sad.
Our principal investigator leaves us with these parting words.
I would probably have people realize that you shouldn't just look at a cat and go like, oh yeah,
(24:52):
I'm just gonna look at this cat. I'm just gonna see what touches everything. I would like people to
actually think about it, all the hair that's in the way and how the cat actually sits and all that.
As Kerry and Kaeden and found, you can rest assured that unless you have a hairless cat,
(25:13):
pending further research, the entirety of your home is not in fact in need of a visit from
the health department. Or if it is, it's more likely because of your guest stove. Not your cat.
Check your carbon monoxide alarms, folks. And use enzyme cleaners not bleach for biostains.
(25:34):
Alrighty. All of the questions raised in these past two episodes are effectively to be continued.
Going back to Dr. Shodiya here. Science never stops. There is no scientific question that you could
put a period at the end of the sentence and say, that's it, we're done. Everything is finished here.
(25:55):
How can we possibly say this is all there is when so much has yet to be uncovered and explored?
How can we say we know all we need to know about cats? Hence this podcast in which I guess you could say,
I'm something of a scientist myself. Or I just play one on TV. Once someone picks this up and
(26:21):
hires me to go on a world tour about cats. From here on out, that's Dr. Captain Kitty. I think that's
how that works. I've been happy to have you along as we've traveled several degrees across various
subjects in science here. Thus concludes our two-part series on science. My conclusion?
(26:43):
Curiosity did not kill the cat. Possibly gamma rays did. But given that cats are possibly
mostly liquid and are exceptionally agile, perhaps we can conclude that Schrodinger's cat
found a corner to slide out of the box entirely and land on its two feet. Ah, cats and science. Boy,
(27:06):
they've certainly left their paw or puckers shaped imprints all over the history of science.
And that's not all they've walked or sat on while we've tried to work.
What's that about 15th century manuscripts with cat pee and paw prints all over them?
Was it personal? Was it a critique of a terrible score? Tune in next time to find out.
(27:31):
I want to thank my wonderful experts Kareem Elsayad, Titi Shodiyaa. And Kaeden and his mom, Kerry.
While the opinions are my own, the research and the work is theirs. If you'd like to learn more about
them, please check out our show notes, which also include the references and research that went into
this episode. If you loved it, please leave us a five star rating and a review and share it with
(27:54):
someone who needs more curiosity in their life. Thanks again, folks. I appreciate you. We're all in
this together. My hypothesis? Everything is connected.
Six degrees of cats is produced, written, edited and hosted by yours,
truly. Captain Keri, aka Amanda B. Please subscribe to our mailing list by visiting tinyurl.com/six
(28:22):
degrees of cats 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 misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient, and the weird. And of course,
(28:43):
all the cats we've loved and lost.
The next time you see your cat dangling from your curtain, well, maybe they are absolutely liquid.
This cat is liquid.
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