The thousand-year-old question to the feline team: “Is a cat a liquid?” was answered by a “free” scientist.
What is a liquid? A form of matter that allows it to enter everything that has the nature of a container. And if that’s the case, you know cats are runny too.
It’s unclear how the cat got into every corner that seemed impossible
For all of us, of course, a cat is a “sturdy” creature. But some aftermarket scientists don’t think so. There is a group of experts dedicated to studying the “liquefaction” of cats, and this research even won the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics in September 2017.
This is Marc-Antoine Fardin, expert in rheology from the University of Paris Diderot with his research report: Are cats both solid and liquid?
Why can cats be liquid?
The “fit into any container” property of a liquid that takes time to adjust is called “relaxation time”. Depending on the density of the liquid, this time can be slow or fast.
Now for the cat. It is not clear how they can get into utopian containers, as long as there is enough time. This proves that the cat will be liquid, if it is allowed time to turn into liquid.
In rheology, the state of matter is not fixed, which is why cats can be liquid. In it, what needs to be weighed and measured is the break. For cats, for example, does the cat’s rest lengthen over time, like a change in fluid density?
In addition, will “containment” affect this rupture? Or what role does external pressure play? This is the question Fardin had to answer.
Chat flow
Determining the morphology of the material requires comparing two amounts of time: the interval and the duration of the test (the time it takes to begin the deformation process upon entry into the container).
For example, if a cat enters the sink. Usually the formula is to divide the time interval by the test time. If the result is greater than 1, this material is solid; if it is less than 1, it is liquid.
These numbers are called Deborah numbers – derived from a nun who said that before God even mountains melt. With this number, even when the break is very large (takes a whole day), matter is still considered liquid when the Deborah number is small. And vice versa, even when the break is very small, the material remains solid if the Deborah number is large.
In addition, there is another number used to determine if the flow of a liquid is chaotic (including vortexing), or if it enters a container smoothly. If the flow rate is V and the vessel size is h, we determine this using the formula V / h.
If the flow rate is greater than 1, it is a turbulent flow. On the contrary, less than 1 – smooth flow.
What’s the summary? As Marc-Antoine Fardin’s rheology encompasses painful reading skills, the cat is a liquid! But of course, Fardin shares this research just for the fun of it, as it is more abstract than practical.
