Some books turn on a little experiment bulb in your head the moment you read their title. “Why cats land on their feet?” sounds simple enough — but it’s actually a philosophical trap. You think you know the answer, but you really don’t. Mark Levi lives in that gray area — where the seriousness of physics meets childlike curiosity.
This book is made up of 77 small paradoxes. But not the kind you flip through over coffee. Some are so technical that if you start with just high-school physics, you might crash and burn by page ten. Levi’s goal isn’t to intimidate you with formulas; it’s to push you into that delightful moment of “Wait, have I been wrong about this all along?”
For example, he asks what happens when two astronauts, floating in zero gravity, push a helium balloon toward each other. Does the capsule move? The balloon? The universe? On another page, he explains how to remove a cork from a wine bottle by hitting it against a wall with a book — complete with the physics behind it. Reading these parts feels like flipping through the back pages of an old Popular Science magazine from the 1980s.
But not every chapter is that fun. Some sections really do feel like engineering lecture notes. When Levi says, “Just think of it this way,” you might still be stuck wondering, “Wait, who was Bernoulli again?” So yes, this book both delights you and pokes you with a mild existential reminder: “Maybe I don’t know as much as I thought I did.”
Still, Levi’s gift is keeping the spirit of “why does this happen?” alive. Why can a child get a swing moving without touching the ground? The answer lies in that elusive “energy transfer” teachers always talk about — and Levi manages to explain it as if Newton himself were sitting on the swing, testing his own laws.
The book ends with an appendix — a mini physics glossary that runs from Newton’s laws to the basics of calculus. Reading it feels like realizing that every “weird little thing” you just learned actually has a solid foundation.
Mark Levi’s Why Cats Land on Their Feet is a strange little alley where scientific wisdom and childlike wonder meet. Each corner hides an experiment that flips your expectations, each page offers a small “aha!” moment. But fair warning: if you plan to relax with this book, bring not just a cup of coffee but also a notebook — and patience.
This book isn’t about the dullness of physics — it’s about its wonder. You don’t just learn why cats land on their feet; you start noticing the ground beneath your own a little differently.
That’s why reading Mark Levi makes you feel a bit like a cat and a scientist at once — always curious, always falling, and somehow, always landing on your feet.
