Perpetual Motion

Hi,

There has been tremeandous response from you guys. Thanks a lot. I promise I will show the same energy and enthu in maintaining the blog for the days to come. I have enabled comments for my blogs. Please thrash me. I actually got a very good piece from a friend of mine, Avinash Iyer (The higher you go the Iyer you become - as he claims). The piece he sent is very much in line with the current theme I am running. So I thought I would make it the topic for today. Here is the quote my friend has sent to me:

"We know that the cat lands with its feet downside when thrown into the air. We also know that the bread always falls butter side down when thrown into the air. So if we stick a peice of bread to the cat's back and then put butter on the bread, then we would have achieved a perpetual motion machine that will keep rotating above the floor at a constant speed, not knowing which side to fall down first?"

Lemme guide you to the link pmm. The above joke reminds me of one of our quant profs who keeps rotating around the desk while teaching, like the cat above. Guess he has a butter bread attached somewhere :-)). The above joke put two questions in my crappy head - if at all such a perpetually moving cat is possible according to physical laws, what will happen when the cat dies? Also, will the cat keep rotating at 'constant speed' as mentioned in the joke? Actually, the joke is well worded in that it does not attribute perpetual motion to any physical laws, it just says the cat keeps rotating not knowing which side should fall first. So maybe only confusion can lead to perpetual motion. Yes, I know what came into your mind just now - Is this guy perpetually confused? Yeah, you are right ;-)