Caroline's Science Experiment. Of Particular Interest if you Hate Cats.

Caroline is doing a project for her third grade science fair this year. She's decide to myth bust the following belief: that if you drop a piece of buttered bread, it will always land butter side down. Her belief was that, in fact, even buttered bread would attend to the law of averages and probability and simply fall butter side down half the time.

She was also aware that cats always land on their feet. So she further decided to see what would happen if you strapped a piece of buttered bread to the back of a cat and let it fall. Would it fall butter side down? Cat feet down? Or would the dropped cat simply spin perpetually in the air on a horizontal plane, like a chicken on a spit roast, unable to land since it was caught between two absolutes?

The family pitched in and here are the results:



We dropped three different types of bread–whole wheat, white, and pumpernickel–from a height of six feet. Each of the pieces was cut into a perfect circle to minimize the drag coefficient. Each slice was dropped fifty times with three different types of spreads: butter; margarine; and "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." (Personally I want to launch a new spread called, "What the F*ck Is This?" but that's for a later time.) Each slice was held vertically, by hand, so as not to allow for a predisposition of one side or the other.

The results proved Caroline's hypothesis. The overall average of the drops were somewhere between 24 for one side and 26 for the other, or reasonably close to fifty percent per slice. There was no pattern to the drops. It's not as if, for instance, it consistently started falling on the butter side and then, over time, shifted to the unbuttered side as the buttered side diminished. At any given time it could fall either way. The ONLY exception to this was pumpernickel with "I Can't Believe it's not Butter" on it. In that instance, it skewed widely toward falling on the buttered side (or, if you will, the "I Can't Believe it's not Buttered" side.) The anomalous result leads one to believe that, if you want to avoid having your buttered bread falling butter side down, you'd be wise to avoid either pumpernickel or else "I Can't Believe it's not Butter." We leave the choice of which one to avoid to your personal taste.

Then we moved on to the cat portion.

Kathleen created a harness and strapped it to one of our gray tabbies. A dish was on the other side of the harness, and a piece of white buttered bread was attached to it. The cat was then carried to the proper height and held sideways as much as the squirming animal would allow, and then dropped. The cat landed feet first. Trying this fifty times wasn't practical, but we did manage to complete three drops. In retrospect, the dropper–Kathleen–should have been wearing gloves and long sleeves as the third time the cat did a pretty good number on her arms before she was able to release it. Once again the cat landed on its feet. Then it managed to twist its head around and tear up the bread–our last sample–with its teeth, thus bringing to an abrupt termination both the experiment and our hopes of winning the Nobel Prize for inventing a perpetual motion machine. It did, however, prompt me to make a note about creating a space ship that runs on the energy generated by a spinning cat with buttered bread on its back.

Science marches on.

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