The author of this physics paper is 7 years old (also a cat).

On April 14, american physical society announced a landmark policy change: all scientific papers written by cats will be open to the public free of charge.

This statement was a joke (it was April Fool's Day), but the cat that inspired it was not. His name is Chester-F.D.C. Willard, and he is famous in the scientific community. He can be said to be the successor of 1975 Schrodinger.

Later, the name of Chester Willard, the most famous cat in physics, appeared in Physical Review Letters with the name of Jack Hetherington, a professor of physics at Michigan State University, and was published in an influential paper on helium -3 isotope in low-temperature physics. Helium -3 isotope is an element with different neutron numbers in the nucleus (here, helium). Hetherington is the owner of Chester. In order to solve a grammatical mistake, he first wrote the name of this 7-year-old Siamese cat on paper. [18 The biggest unsolved mystery in physics]

As a colleague pointed out when editing the draft, hetherington listed himself as the only author of the study, but he still wrote the whole paper with the pronoun "we". This colleague pointed out that this violated the stylistic rules of the Wall Street Journal. Hetherington's paper will be rejected if it is not reprinted. however

Hetherington is eager to submit his works. Heather Linton said in her book CRC Press (1982): "It seems too difficult to make papers objective now, because they are both written and typed." So, I thought about it all night and only asked the secretary to change the title page and add the name of the domestic cat.

Of course, Chester's name is too famous for friends and colleagues in hetherington, so an alias is needed. He thinks that F.D.C. Willard-F.D.C is the abbreviation of Felicity Mestikus Chester, and Willard is the name of Tom Cat's father in Chester.

And so on,1975165438+1October 24th, the paper co-authored by hetherington and his cat was published in the 35th issue of Physical Review Letters. [Are cats smarter than dogs? ]

Many colleagues in hetherington know this trick, but it seems that few people care. For example, the head of the physics department of Michigan State University accepted the cat's deception. Hetherington wrote in the letter: "Chairman ... Willard was included in the works published by the Department of Physics, thus exaggerating some statistics required by * * *." I'm not sure whether this will help or hinder my own efforts to get funding.

Chester's true identity was finally exposed when a student went to Hesselin with a question about the paper. When Heiselin could not be found, the student asked to talk to Willard. Hetherington wrote, "Everyone laughed, and soon the cat came out of the bag. The cat later retired from science, but its alias had a life of its own. A few years later, a French paper on helium -3 appeared in laroche magazine under the name of F.D.C Willard. (Obviously, hetherington wrote that the actual research team could not agree on a paper that satisfied them, so they decided to attribute this achievement to the best cat published in the United States. )

Up to now, Chester's paper on helium -3 has been cited more than 50 times, and a non-human research author's zoo has followed his terrible footsteps. From 65438 to 0978, Polly Mattsinger, an immunologist and famous Lord of the Rings fan, co-authored a paper with an Afghan hound named Garad milk Wood. In recent 200 1 year, a paper on gyroscopes written by a.K.Geim and H.a.M.S.TerTisha was published in Physics B: Condensed Matter. In 20 10, Gaim won the Nobel Prize for discovering graphene. Tisha is his pet hamster.

Originally published in Life Science.