Are Cats Liquid?
An in-depth study.
Most contemporary physicists are concerned with technical, big-picture questions: Why do neutrinos have mass when the Standard Model says that they shouldn’t? Why are quantum field theory and general relativity irreconcilable even though both are empirically valid? Can nuclear fusion be used as an efficient power source? And so on. These questions are important but they aren’t really in line with the sort of everyday, practical problems that occupy the minds of the general public. For example, are cats liquids or solids?
The earliest (c. 2014) researcher to have seriously investigated this question seems to be a person named Tom who submitted his findings to the Funny Animals section of the journal Bored Panda in an article entitled “15 Proofs That Cats are Liquids.” Drawing from the results of 15 experiments using a variety of cat breeds and container geometries, Tom concluded that cats have a tendency to assume the shape of their container, which is a fundamental property of both liquids and gases. Furthermore, cats in the experiment tended to show negligible change in volume, which is a characteristic property of liquids.
Perhaps unsatisfied by the strictly qualitative nature of Tom’s study and the peer review standards of Bored Panda, further research was conducted by Marc-Antoin Fardin at the École normale supérieure (Paris)…
