This Physicist Believes He’s Solved The Mystery Of Feline Movement
If you’ve got a cat, I can almost guarantee you spend a lot of time just watching them exist in your shared space.
They’re funny, and they have a multitude of ways to move across a room depending on their mood or their company – but is there a way to decode all of that, officially?
Physicist Dr. Anxo Biasi says he’s no behavior expert, but he can explain it all using physics. In fact, he’s come up with an “equation of cat motion.”
“This article aims to bring physics closer to non-experts, offering a pleasant example through which it is possible to understand several concepts of classical mechanics. To do so, an equation is constructed that models the behavior of a cat in the presence of a person, considering the former as a point particle that moves in a potential induced by the human.”
His conclusions are largely drawn from observing his own cat, called Eme, in their home. There, he identified seven patterns in Eme’s motions around his physical presence.
He places himself, the human, at the center of the modeling by labeling his location as x=o. The cat’s position is x, and if m is the cat’s mass, and ϵ the coefficient of friction created by the cat’s fatigue, Biasi begins with a basic formula of md2x/dt2 = – dV(δ)cat(x)/dx – ϵdx/dt.
Biasi then observes his cat’s patterns and adds complicating factors like purring or excitement before bed. Purring, he says, is an opportunity to demonstrate the physics of a self-reinforcing system.
“It is proposed that when a cat is being stroked and starts to purr, people tend to feel the impulse to continue stroking it, thus reinforcing the stability of the process.”
Six of the regular cat behavior fall under what he calls “low-energy limit,” but the “zoomies” (or frenetic random activity periods) involve a higher energy state.
This state can only be modeled by introducing a randomization function, which makes sense, because no one – including the cat – knows where they will end up. His additional term, of(t) reflects this as a stochastic process under the Euler-Maruyama method used to model Brownian motion.
This paper is not peer reviewed, and as the only author on the project, Biasi acknowledges that his equations “are not universal and some cats may display a weaker version of some of them.”
He does maintain that anyone who has a cat can peer review them at their leisure.
So, you know…go forth and do some complicated math with your cat.
Thought that was fascinating? Here’s another story you might like: Why You’ll Never See A Great White Shark In An Aquarium

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