In a letter to his wife, James Maxwell described throwing cats out of windows at Cambridge to investigate this quantity. For 10 points each:
[10e] The fact that cats can turn around in mid-air to land on their feet is an apparent contradiction of the conservation of this quantity. This quantity, symbolized L, equals rotational inertia times angular velocity.
ANSWER: angular momentum [reject “momentum” or “linear momentum”]
[10m] The apparent violation comes from treating the cat as one of these objects. The distance between all pairs of points is constant in these non-deformable objects.
ANSWER: rigid bodies
[10h] Falling cats are an example of a system that [emphasize] lacks this property. Systems with this property have the same number of degrees of freedom as generalized coordinates.
ANSWER: holonomic system
<Wisconsin A, Physics>