Why Cats Land on Their Feet by Levi, Mark -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments 1 Fun with Physical Paradoxes, Puzzles, and Problems

1.1 Introduction 1.2 Background 1.3 Sources

2 Outer Space Paradoxes

2.1 A Helium Balloon in a Space Shuttle 2.2 Space Navigation without Jets 2.3 A Paradox with a Comet 2.4 Speeding Up Causes a Slowdown

3 Paradoxes with Spinning Water

3.1 A Puzzle with a Floating Cork 3.2 Parabolic Mirrors and Two Kitchen Puzzles 3.3 A Cold Parabolic Dish 3.4 Boating on a Slope 3.5 Navigating with No Engine or Sails 3.6 The Icebergs

4 Floating and Diving Paradoxes

4.1 A Bathtub on Wheels 4.2 The Tub Problem—In More Depth 4.3 How to Lose Weight in a Fraction of a Second 4.4 An Underwater Balloon 4.5 A Scuba Puzzle 4.6 A Weight Puzzle

5 Flows and Jets

5.1 Bernoulli’s Law and Water Guns 5.2 Sucking on a Straw and the Irreversibility of Time 5.3 Bernoulli’s Law and Moving Around in a Space Shuttle 5.4 A Sprinker Puzzle 5.5 Ejecting Water Fast but with Zero Speed? 5.6 A Pouring Water Puzzle 5.7 A Stirring Paradox 5.8 An Inkjet Printer Question 5.9 A Vorticity Paradox

6 Moving Experiences: Bikes, Gymnastics, Rockets

6.1 How Do Swings Work? 6.2 The Rising Energy Cost 6.3 A Gymnast Doing Giants and a Hamster in a Wheel 6.4 Controlling a Car on Ice 6.5 How Does a Biker Turn? 6.6 Speeding Up by Leaning 6.7 Can One Gain Speed on a Bike by Body Motion Only? 6.8 Gaining Weight on a Motorbike 6.9 Feeling the Square in mv 2/2 Through the Bike Pedals 6.10 A Paradox with Rockets 6.11 A Coffee Rocket 6.12 Throwing a Ball from a Moving Car

7 Paradoxes with the Coriolis Force

7.1 What Is the Coriolis Force? 7.2 Feeling Coriolis in a Boeing 747 7.3 Down the Drain with Coriolis 7.4 High Pressure and Good Weather 7.5 What Causes Trade Winds?

8 Centrifugal Paradoxes

8.1 What’s Cheaper: Flying West or East? 8.2 A Coriolis Paradox 8.3 An Amazing Inverted Pendulum: What Holds It Up? 8.4 Antigravity Molasses 8.5 The “Proof” That the Sling Cannot Work 8.6 A David–Goliath Problem 8.7 Water in a Pipe 8.8 Which Tension Is Greater? 8.9 Slithering Ropes in Weightlessness

9 Gyroscopic Paradoxes

9.1 How Does the Spinning Top Defy Gravity? 9.2 Gyroscopes in Bikes 9.3 A Rolling Coin 9.4 Staying on a Slippery Dome 9.5 Finding North with a Gyroscope

10 Some Hot Stuff and Cool Things

10.1 Can Heat Pass from a Colder to a Hotter Object? 10.2 A Bike Pump and Molecular Ping-Pong 10.3 A Bike Pump as a Heat Pump 10.4 Heating a Room in Winter 10.5 Freezing Things with a Bike Tire

11 Two Perpetual Motion Machines

11.1 Perpetual Motion by Capillarity 11.2 An Elliptical Mirror Perpetuum Mobile

12 Sailing and Gliding

12.1 Shooting Cherry Pits and Sailing 12.2 Sailing Straight into the Wind 12.3 Biking against the Wind 12.4 Soaring without Updrafts 12.5 Danger of the Horizontal Shear Wind

13 The Flipping Cat and the Spinning Earth

13.1 How Do Cats Flip to Land on Their Feet? 13.2 Can Trade Winds Slow Earth’s Rotation?

14 Miscellaneous

14.1 How to Open a Wine Bottle with a Book 14.2 “It’s Alive!” 14.3 Falling Faster Than g: A Falling Chain “Sucked in” by the Floor 14.4 A Man in a Boat with Drag 14.5 A “Phantom” Boat: No Wake and No Drag 14.6 A Constant-G Roller Coaster 14.7 Shooting at a Cart 14.8 Computing 2 with a Shoe

Appendix

A.1 Newton’s Laws A.2 Kinetic Energy, Potential Energy, Work

A.2.1 Work A.2.2 Kinetic Energy A.2.3 Potential Energy A.2.4 Conservation of Energy

A.3 Center of Mass A.4 Linear Momentum A.5 The Torque A.6 Angular Momentum A.7 Angular Velocity, Centripetal Acceleration A.8 Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces A.9 Coriolis, Centrifugal, and Complex Exponentials A.10 The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus

Bibliography Index