If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on the floor
butter-side down. If a cat is dropped from a window or other high and
towering place, it will land on its feet.
But what if you attach a
buttered piece of bread, butter-side up to a cat's back and toss them both
out the window? Will the cat land on its feet? Or will the butter splat on
the ground?
Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment yourself
you should be able to deduce the obvious result. The laws of butterology
demand that the butter must hit the ground, and the equally strict laws of
feline aerodynamics demand that the cat can not smash its furry back. If the
combined construct were to land, nature would have no way to resolve this
paradox. Therefore it simply does not fall.
That's right you clever
mortal (well, as clever as a mortal can get), you have discovered the secret
of antigravity! A buttered cat will, when released, quickly move to a height
where the forces of cat-twisting and butter repulsion are in equilibrium.
This equilibrium point can be modified by scraping off some of the butter,
providing lift, or removing some of the cat's limbs, allowing descent.
Most of the civilized species of the Universe already use this
principle to drive their ships while within a planetary system. The loud
humming heard by most sighters of UFOs is, in fact, the purring of several
hundred tabbies.
The one obvious danger is, of course, if the cats
manage to eat the bread off their backs they will instantly plummet. Of
course the cats will land on their feet, but this usually doesn't do them
much good, since right after they make their graceful landing several tons of
red-hot starship and ticked off aliens crash on top of them.
And now
a few words on solving the problem of creating a ship using the
aforementioned anti-gravity device.
One could power a ship by means
of cats held in suspended animation (say, about -190 degrees Celsius) with
buttered bread strapped to their backs, thus avoiding the possibility of
collisions due to tempermental felines. More importantly, how do you steer,
once the cats are all held in stasis?
I offer a modest proposal:
We all know that wearing a white shirt at an Italian restaurant is a
guaranteed way to take a trip to the laudromat. Plaster the outside of your
ship with white shirts. Place four nozzles symmetrically around the ship,
which is, of course, saucer shaped. Fire tomato sauce out in proportion to
the directions you want to go. The ship, drawn by the shirts, will
automatically follow the sauce. If you use t-shirts, you won't go as fast as
you would by using, say, expensive dress shirts. This does not work as well
in deep gravity wells, since the tomato sauce (now falling down a black hole,
perhaps) will drag the ship with it, despite the counter force of the
anti-gravity cat/butter machine. Your only hope at that point is to jettison
enormous quantities of Tide. This will create the well-known Gravitational
Tidal Force.
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"Be patient toward all
that is unsolved
in your heart and try to love the questions
themselves.. Live the questions now. Perhaps
you will find them
gradually, without noticing
it, live along some distant day into the
answer."
- Ranier Maria Rilke
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