Chester, the first published Felix
If a cat can do it, you can too
Fact: There’s a cat that is co-author of a theoretical physics paper.
In 1975, American mathematician and physicist Professor Jack H. Hetherington wrote an entire paper (on low temperature physics, if you were wondering) on a typewriter, only to be told by his supervisor that it would be rejected by the journal he was intending to publish it in – Physical Review Letters – as had written “we” and “us” throughout despite being the sole author. Rather than re-type his whole paper, he decided to add a worthy co-author instead – namely one F.D.C. Willard. Which of course stands for Felix Domesticus Chester Willard. Which of course was his faithful Siamese cat.
The paper was accepted and published. F.D.C. Willard went on to publish, as the sole author, an article titled “Two-, Three- and Four- atom Exchange Effects”… and no, I don’t understand what that means either. Chester was regularly cited for his “useful contributions” and was even offered a physics fellowship at Michigan State University.
Three gruelling years of Natural Sciences at Cambridge and there is some cat that is objectively a more successful scientist than I am. I mean what is the point...
Another one of Mr. Aran Shaunak’s Little Bites of Science @BitesOfScience
