Nov 30, 2010

Gravitational Anarchy

A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.

In this podcast, we revist some ideas from our recent epsiode on Falling. We begin with a story excerpted from an essay by Berton Roueché, which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1958 and was later published by Dutton in a book called "The Medical Detectives." Read for us by the actress Hope Davis, it tells the true tale of a woman named Rosemary Morton, who had a little, um, trouble with gravity. After that, we return to a segment from the Falling episode that has troubled some of our listeners: the mystery of falling cats. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist extraordinaire and Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, takes us to task for using "bad data." We call on science writer David Quammen to help us fight back and, in the end, we wonder how we can ever know the mind of a falling cat. 

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