Dr. Anxo Biasi, a physicist at the Galician Institute for High Energy Physics, believes he has discovered something in his field that is as elusive as quantum phenomena: the cat’s equation of motion. Or, more precisely, how cats behave in the presence of humans.
Erwin Schrödinger made two important contributions to physics. Wave equations and superposition quantum cats. Felis catus has been inextricably linked with advanced physics ever since. (Although some would argue that the connection goes back even further, to our collective fascination with the nimble way cats always land on their feet).
This connection seems to have reached its peak when cats were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for discovering that they can be both liquid and solid. But Biasi believes there is still more work to be done on this topic. “This article aims to make physics accessible to non-experts by providing enjoyable examples to understand several concepts of classical mechanics,” he wrote in a statement. “For this, I created equations that model the behavior of cats in the presence of humans. Electrons are considered as point particles moving in electric potentials induced by humans.”
Although he sought help from friends familiar with cat behavior, the work is largely based on the observations of Emme, the single cat who shares her home with Biasi. He begins with the hypothesis that “cats behave as if they perceive forces around their humans,” and then identifies seven patterns in Emme’s movements that he describes.
However, the researchers put humans at the center of their modeling, defining the human’s position as x=0 and the cat’s position as x. Biasi starts with the basic formula, where m is the cat’s mass and ϵ is the drag coefficient of the cat’s fatigue.
md2x/dt2 = – dV(δ)cat(x)/dx – ϵdx/dt.
From there, he used his observations of Emmet’s model to add complex elements such as purring sounds and nocturnal energy bursts to the formula.
“It started as a playful idea for April Fool’s Day,” says Biasi. “But I soon realized that the equations I created could be of great help to physics students.”
A cat’s purring provides an opportunity to demonstrate the physics of self-reinforcing systems. For example, Biasi argued: “Once you pet a cat and it starts purring, people tend to feel the urge to keep petting them. It enhances the reliability of the process.” Who knows how many people have been delayed in important tasks (perhaps even major breakthroughs in physics) by the moral tug of a cat purring on their lap, even if they may not be physically able to shake it?
Biasi believes kneeling behavior and five other behaviors, including not answering phones, zoning out and shaking your head, fall into the low-energy range. However, nocturnal bursts (also known as periods of feverish random activity, or PFSA) involve higher energy states. PFSA can only be modeled by introducing a random function. Because even cats don’t know what’s going to happen. To account for this, Biasi treats the movement of the magnified cat as a stochastic process using the Euler-Maruyama method, which is also used to model Brownian motion, by adding an additional term σf
But there are a few things worth noting about this piece.
First of all, Biasi is listed as the sole author of the paper. Where is Ame? The acknowledgments also say, “The author is grateful to the cat for being a source of inspiration,” which is a bit of a shame for the times when writers expressed gratitude for their work without mentioning their wives’ names.
More importantly, Biasi points out that his modeling is entirely classical, and that cats are considered “point particles that follow Newtonian mechanics.” And given the established quantum behavior of cats, this seems a serious simplification, even if it is unlikely that cats obey anyone else’s laws, including Newton’s. To be fair, Biasi admits that his equations are “not universal and some cats may exhibit weaker versions of some of them.” He also claims that his work can “reproduce the characteristic behavior of cats,” so that people who understand his equations and can observe cats can judge their accuracy for themselves.
Example photo from Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-and-grey-kitten-on-brown-and-black-leopard-print-textile-45201/
