The Buttered Cat Paradox

We all know that cats always land on their feet while buttered toast always lands butter side down. There is a paradox arising when you combine these two sayings together:

“What would happen if you attached a piece of buttered toast buttered side up to the back of the catand then dropped that cat from a very tall height”

Would the cat ever land or would it just spin indefinitely?

If we engage in some thought experiments on the subject we can start to develop a hypothesis of what might happen as the cat falls.

The cat will try to spin and bring its feet facing downward. The toast on the other hand will want to flip and bring the buttered side down as well. As the two objects fall, they will slow down and start to rotate. At a very short distance above the ground, they will eventually start hovering, while both the cat’s feet and the buttered toast try to land in their respective ways.

Doing so would create an antigravity. The idea was discussed in great detail for years and now this paradox has remained unanswered….. An explanation could be given if the project was approached from an engineering perspective.

In this case, we have to examine both the cat and the toast as able to exert a rotational force upon themselves to always land in their respective orientations. This rotational force would be respective to their mass and as the cat contains obviously more we can assume that the net force in the body would be in the direction of the cat’s feet. The cat would definitely win out in this battle by landing on its feet. As long as the toast continued to be strapped to the cat’s back after the cat landed, the toast would continue exerting a rotational force on the back of the cat, which the feline would be able to overcome through friction with its paws on the ground.

This could be a solution to one of the most famous paradoxes in history but maybe not the only one.