The buttered cat array

Tweet

I just mentioned this to @JudyEv so I thought I may as well write about it. Some years ago I remember reading a jokey article in (I think) New Scientist magazine. It was a proposal for the creation of a perpetual motion machine, based on two observations: 1) Cats ‘always’ land on their feet, and 2) Toast ‘always’ lands butter side down. The author therefore suggested that if a slice of buttered toast was strapped to the back of a cat and the cat was dropped from a sufficient height to allow rotation, the cat would rotate to be feet-down, but then this effect would be counteracted by the toast which would exert an opposing force in order to land butter-side-down. The overall effect would be continuous rotation so that neither the cat nor the toast would land, thus creating perpetual motion and a levitation effect against gravity. Obviously it's just a joke but it made me laugh anyway! More recently there have actually been several studies on buttered toast and they discovered that the reason toast lands buttered-side-down is a function of the typical way in which a piece of toast is likely to be knocked off a table and the height of the usual table. In experiments the toast landed buttered-side-down between 66% and 81% of the time. All of that is making me fancy a piece of buttered toast now! All rights reserved. © Text copyright Fleur 2026. Image from Pampling.com