Taiwan teacher draws flak for dropping his own cat in class to teach physics

We know cats are capable of landing on their feet.

But a teacher in Taiwan is learning the hard way that holding a cat over your head and then suddenly dropping it onto a hard floor, in front of dozens of students, may not be such a smart thing to do.

The teacher – identified in Taiwan news reports as Mr Lee Feng – was trying to demonstrate a principle in known physics as the “conservation of angular momentum”.

That principle says it is impossible for an object that is not spinning to suddenly rotate without external influence.

In other words, cats shouldn’t be landing on their feet if they aren’t pushing off anything, say a wall or the hands of the person dropping them.

Yet, they do.

Scientists explain that a cat has a natural balancing system called the “righting reflex” that allows it to quickly reorient itself and land on its feet.

It also has an extremely flexible spine that lets its upper and lower body rotate in opposite directions, allowing it to use the inertia of its own body to spin rapidly.

Mr Lee was apparently inspired by videos on YouTube that show cats being dropped from a height to show how they can land on their feet using the very same principles of physics that they seem to defy.