Cats are wonderful gymnasts. Their ability to land on their feet – even when dropped upside-down – caught the attention of two of the nineteenth century’s greatest mathematical physicists, Sir George Gabriel Stokes and James Clerk Maxwell.
The remarkable feats of cats inspired these theorists to perform, in the 1850s, legendary experiments in “cat-turning”, as Maxwell later described:
“There is a tradition in Trinity that when I was here I discovered a method of throwing a cat so as not to light…
