Not Schrödinger

Taking a break from heavy-duty political issues, let’s move to the world of science, which—truth be known—can be just as red in tooth and claw as presidential campaigns.

Do you doubt me? Well, for instance, it turns out that a cat co-authored a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, an arm of the American Physical Society (APS).

Okay, the paper, “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He” was published in 1975, so you might have missed it, even though it was an in-depth exploration of atomic behavior at different temperatures. Pretty riveting stuff, I’m sure, to a physicist.

It seems that the human author, Jack H. Hetherington, professor of physics at Michigan State University, had written up his research findings using the editorial first person plural. But then he realized that the journal to which he was submitting it would view it as fishy (which, in the academic world means “unpublishable”) if the paper was littered with “we”, “us” and “our”, but had only one author listed. This being back in the 1970s, Hetherington did not have word processing software, so he was faced with either retyping the entire paper or coming up with a quick fix on the front end.

So he added his Siamese cat Chester as a co-author, granting him rather more gravitas by giving him the nom de plume “F.D.C. Willard”, viz.: Felix Domesticus Chester Willard, the alleged surname referring to Chester’s father, so a legitimate patronymic.

Based on my experience with felis catus, I’ve no doubt that Chester was a contributor to the creative process. In fact, I’m betting that the hard copy submission had more than a few cat hairs on it.

Evidently when the Physical Review Letters editors found out about Chester’s antecedents, they were not amused. But by that time they’d already published the paper. And how is it that they didn’t ask for academic bona fides at the time of submission? Hetherington’s department, on the other hand, offered Chester a full-time position.

Eventually the APS found its sense of humor. Two years ago they announced that all cat-authored papers would be open-access. No word on dog-authored papers, but I guess these things take time.