Here's a paradox from the Net. I don't know who wrote this, but it wasn't me. I found it quite amusing. Its just for fun of course. This is not, to the best of my knowledge at any rate, the current state-of-the-art in rocket science. Practical Applications for Paradoxes.
If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on the floor
butter-side down. If a cat is dropped from a window or other high and
towering place, it will land on its feet. But what if you attach a buttered
piece of bread, butter-side up to a cat's back and toss them both out the
window? Will the cat land on its feet? Or will the butter splat on the
ground?
Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment yourself you should be able
to deduce the obvious result. The laws of butterology demand that the
butter must hit the ground, and the equally strict laws of feline
aerodynamics demand that the cat can not smash its furry back. If the
combined construct were to land, nature would have no way to resolve this
paradox. Therefore it simply does not fall.
In other words, we have the makings of antigravity. A buttered cat will,
when released, quickly move to a height where the forces of cat-twisting
and butter repulsion are in equilibrium. This equilibrium point can be
modified by scraping off some of the butter, providing lift, or removing
some of the cat's limbs, allowing descent.
Most of the civilized species of the Universe already use this principle to
drive their ships while within a planetary system. The loud humming heard
by most sighters of UFOs is, in fact, the purring of several hundred
tabbies.
The one obvious danger is, of course, if the cats manage to eat the bread
off their backs they will instantly plummet. Of course the cats will land
on their feet, but this usually doesn't do them much good, since right
after they make their graceful landing several tons of red-hot starship and
pissed off aliens crash on top of them.
But how could the above be used in practice? One could power a ship by
means of cats held in suspended animation (say, about -190 degrees Celsius)
with buttered bread strapped to their backs, thus avoiding the possibility
of collisions due to tempermental felines. but, more importantly, how do
you steer, once the cats are all held in stasis?
We all know that wearing a white shirt at an Italian restaurant is a
guaranteed way to take a trip to the laudromat. Plaster the outside of your
ship with white shirts. Place four nozzles symmetrically around the ship,
which is, of course, saucer shaped. Fire tomato sauce out in proportion to
the directions you want to go. The ship, drawn by the shirts, will
automatically follow the sauce. If you use t-shirts, you won't go as fast
as you would by using, say, expensive dress shirts. This does not work as
well in deep gravity wells, since the tomato sauce (now falling down a
black hole, perhaps) will drag the ship with it, despite the counter force
of the anti-gravity cat/butter machine. Your only hope at that point is to
jettison enormous quantities of Tide. This will create the well-known
Gravitational Tidal Force.
 � 1998 Vertical Imagineering 'N Co. - We Engineer Epiphanies |
