When someone reads a physics paper in a respected journal, they rarely think about whether a cat wrote it. However, this was the case for an article published in the 1970s attributed to co-author FDC Willard. He was the only cat ever to write a science publication.
Jack H. Hetherington was a professor of physics at Michigan State University in 1975 when he completed an influential and often cited paper on physics. The paper, entitled Double, Triple and Quaternary Exchange Effects in bcc 3He, was a comprehensive exploration of the behavior of atoms at different temperatures. The article would have escaped the attention of most normal people, let alone cats.
He did his best to send it to Physical Review Letters, which today describes itself as “the world’s premier physical correspondence journal.” Before sending it on, Hetherington gave the paper to a colleague to have one last look at the work. Then he encountered a strange problem. Hetherington used the royal “we” throughout the paper. As your colleague has pointed out, Physical Review Letters usually only publish papers that use plural pronouns and adjectives such as “we” and “our” when the paper has more than one author.
Now I know that in 1975 Hetherington could not fix offensive articles by search and replace. In fact, the entire article was typewritten.
In the 1982 book More Random Walks in Science, Hetherington gives other reasons for not wanting to include additional human authors, including that the pay for a published article changes with each additional author, that a scientific author’s reputation dictates what he publishes, and that prestige may suffer if he There are several authors.
Hetherington writes that after an “evening of thought” on the subject, he decided the article was so good that it had to be published quickly. Unwilling to change the plural in the document, he chose the next best option, simply adding a second author: his Siamese cat, Chester. Of course, listing Chester as a co-author might not have been enough, so he came up with the name FDC Willard. “FDC” stands for “Felix Dominicus, Chester”. Willard was Chester’s father’s name.
Hetherington names FDC Willard as one of his colleagues at Michigan State, he has submitted his paper and it has been published in Physical Review Letters 35.
After the study was published, it didn’t take long for Willard’s true identity to be revealed. The first time anyone outside Hetherington close had heard of The World of Cats was when a visitor came to the college looking for the authors. Hetherington was not at home. As quoted in an article in Today I Found Out, Hetherington said, “Everyone was laughing and soon the cat was out of the bag.”
After the unofficial revelation, Hetherington got in on the joke and released a few reprints of the article, signed by both authors. was his regular signature, while Willard’s was a paw print.
