It kinda makes sense that the internet is one big cat playground. While dog owners have always been able to socialize with their pets outdoors, it wasn’t until the web came along that cat lovers could share their obsession. It also doesn’t hurt that the kind of people who spend most of their time indoors and online (i.e., introverted geeks) are more drawn towards a pet that can walk itself.
Of course, it’s not hard to be the internet’s favorite animal when everything about you, from your physiology to your personality, is just purrfect, even when you’re just a kitten. Of all the digital communities dedicated to celebrating felines, today we’re all about r/catsareliquid, a place where pics of cats who have poured themselves into odd places are the norm.
Just what makes cats so flexible, though? According to experts at Cats.com, cats have a jaw-dropping 53 vertebrae (more than humans, who only have 33), mostly due to having over 20 of these small bones throughout their long tails. The bones in a cat’s spine are also very flexibly connected, with elastic cushioning discs between each one.
The elasticity in cats’ vertebrae lets them turn their head and trunk almost 180 degrees, meaning they can have their body facing one way while their head and neck are pointing in the complete opposite direction. These super flexible spinal connections explain why cats can twist in mid-air without damaging their spines and change direction in the blink of an eye.
Now that we know a bit about what makes our feline friends so amazingly bendy, let’s tuck into the topic at hand: are cats liquid? Well, interestingly enough, there’s actual science about this. Writing for Scientific American, Manon Bischoff says that memes referring to cats as liquid caught the eye of physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin of the Jacques Monod Institute, and he had an idea.
In 2014, he began to scientifically study the fluid behavior of cats, a hobby that allowed him to put off his actual work. “This procrastination actually led to some success,” he explains in his TEDx talk. “It won me the Ig Nobel Prize of Physics, which rewards research that makes you laugh as well as think.”
Fardin’s research was based on the science of fluid dynamics, also called rheology. In this field, objects that have a constant volume and a fixed shape are solids. On the other hand, the volume of liquids remains the same, but their shape can change. The latter criterion seems to apply to cats: despite a constant volume, they can bend as they please to squeeze into the most unlikely of places.
As Fardin points out, cats share other properties with liquids, too. For example, they have a yield stress, meaning that a minimum amount of force must be applied before they flow out of a container. In addition, cats, like a fluid, adapt their body to the vessel they enter so that they fill it completely. Basically, if a cat’s head can fit in it, the rest of its body can too.
Well, who are we to argue with science? In the end, whether cats are officially liquid or just chaos wrapped in fur, the internet has spoken. Every photo of a cat melting into a bowl, vase, or sneaker reminds us why we love them: they literally bend the rules, reshape reality, and make the world delightfully weird, one physics-defying act at a time.
What do you think of the cats poured into curious places in this list? Do you have a cat that does the same? Upvote your favorites, share with a cat fan, and feel free to leave a comment if you can’t resist!
