Purrpetual motion machine!
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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This meme is so old it could vote. For Regan.
Where is the boiling water?
Its not boiling because you're watching it. This is basic stuff people.
There was a video about it, which was hilarious. Just to lazy to look it up
The cats not falling if its attached to a generator
Exactly. This only works while falling.
So, no, you're not creating infinite energy, you're just converting gravitational potential energy to electricity (for a short time).
And cats don't weigh anything so this wont have enough torque to produce a meaningful amount of power.
And cats don’t weigh anything
*unless they're standing on your chest while you're in bed, in which case, they weigh several hundred kilograms. But that's not the case here. So, yes, we can work with the approximation of a weightless cat in this scenario.
Well then, I think we need a volunteer.
I think my grandpa saw this meme in his youth
Apart from the problems pointed out by my esteemed colleagues in the comments elsewhere, I am sorry to say that this project, upon which our country has spent so many dollars, is fundamentally flawed. I know that this will be a major disappointment, but we are scientists! We must face the truth!
The entire principle that causes a piece of bread to fall butter side down depends on, as we know, the fundamental law of inconvenience. Butter, touching the floor and getting icky dust and germs on it, is rendered useless, and taints the very bread upon which it is installed. Furthermore, one must clean up the butter from the ground.
Such concentrated inconvenience, combined with Murphy's law, ensures that the buttery bread will indeed fall down and touch that floor.
Touch, gentlemen! For it to be inconvenient, it must make contact with the floor! But if we, in our ambition and satisfied self-regard, ensure that the bread is securely strapped to the back of one of our many, many brave feline test subjects, then the bread can never touch the floor!
Inconvenience then has no mechanism of action, and Murphy smiles upon us no more! This project's delays, long thought to be merely an issue of getting the balance right, of baking the perfect slice of bread, of securing sufficient butter, of scaling up using cheetahs, etc... They are all explained by the tragic and incontrovertible truth that we have been wasting our time on a doomed errand that could never work, even in principle! We must shut down, and stop wasting our time on this foolishness!
I personally have already applied, and been accepted, at the Corpse-Spinning Turbine Project, where I can only hope there is no similar fundamental misunderstanding. I suggest you all do the same.
So it keeps you up, too, eh?
I spend hours every night frustrated by the problem. Perhaps being so associated with Murphy's Law doomed it from the beginning? But then again, perhaps that doom itself can be harnessed?
Perhaps, indeed, we must use a constant stream of cats and bread, letting enough buttery catastrophes happen to sate the fickle spirit, while still maintaining positive energy production.
2010s called, they want their jokes back.
No.
Or instead of bread, two cats.
Are U mad they would fight, or mate
That leads to more motion!
Won’t work cause they are no longer falling… duh
Check out Cato on PSN. Its a puzzle platformer based on this concept!
This is classically called a "buttered cat array". I first remember it in New Scientist sometime last century. Oh, and you need an array, because a single cat will not produce much power on its own.
Surely one only needs to increase the number of buttered cats attached to the generator axel to increase the torque and therefore the energy generated?
I can only speak from the generator side, is there a mechanical engineer specialising in buttered cats amongst us that can confirm/correct this hypothesis?
So then why do we have the idiom, "dead cat bounce"? Seems this would only work until the cat dies. (Entropy is a bastard.)
Cat maintenance is a well-understood field.
Can't fool me, I saw that post about re-charging your cat from a plasma globe...