If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.
Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
~ Douglas Adams.
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time.
Also quoted by Richard Dawkins in his Eulogy for Douglas Adams (17 September 2001)
"Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!"
"The what?" said Richard.
"The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a ..."
"Yes," said Richard, "there was also the small matter of gravity."
"Gravity," said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered." ...
"You see?" he said dropping his cigarette butt, "They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap ... ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see."
"I would have thought it was quite obvious. Anyone could have thought of it."
"Ah," said Dirk, "it is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto nonexistent blindingly obvious."
~ Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (as Dharvatius lexilogicus pointed out in the swinging flap).
Ωστόσο, επινόησε όντως ο Νεύτωνας το γατοθυρίδιο; Η
Wikipedia το χαρακτηρίζει έναν από τους πρώτους σύγχρονους αστικούς μύθους
(αστειακό, θα προτιμούσα στην περίπτωση αυτή). Παρεμπιπτόντως, ολίγος σχετικός Τσόσερ:
The 14th-century English writer Geoffrey Chaucer described a simple cat hole in the "Miller's Tale" from his Canterbury Tales (late 1300s). In the narrative, a servant whose knocks go unanswered uses the cat door to peek in:
An hole he foond, ful lowe upon a bord
Ther as the cat was wont in for to crepe,
And at the hole he looked in ful depe,
And at the last he hadde of hym a sighte.
Από την άλλη, το
Μουσείο Επιστημών του Λονδίνου το 'χει για σίγουρο (χωρίς καμία αναφορά πηγής όμως), το
Mew Scientist, hissss! New Scientist δεν με αφήνει να δω ολόκληρο το σχετικό άρθρο χωρίς συνδρομή, ενώ τα τσακάλια του
snopes.com, αφού είδαν αποδώ, είδαν αποκεί και τελικά απόειδαν χωρίς να καταλήξουν πουθενά, το 'ριξαν στα λογοπαίγνια.
Για την περίπτωση, προτιμώ να δανειστώ ένα άλλο τσιτάτο του Άνταμς από τον
Ντερκ Τζέντλι:
The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.