We've highlighted many different jobs for cats here, like therapy cats, barn cats, ship cats and post office cats, but did you know there was a physicist cat?
Yes, his name was Chester, although in scholarly circles he used the name FDC Willard, and he was co-author of a paper entitled "Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3HeTwo-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He". AtlasObscura describes it as an influential and often cited physics paper about the behavior of atoms at different temperatures.
Most cats I know don't know much about physics, (hell most people I know, myself included, aren't well versed in the behavior of atoms), so how did a cat end up as co-author of a physics paper?
Well, to answer that, we have to look to Chester's human friend, Jack H. Hetherington. He was a professor of physics at Michigan State University. The story goes that he had written the article and realized that throughout the text he had used "we" and "our" instead of "I" and "my". His colleague pointed out that the journal Physical Review Letters generally would only publish articles using plural pronouns if there were multiple authors. And, this was 1975, so Hetherington couldn't just do a find and replace to change all the "we's" to "I's"! This is where our friend Chester comes in! Hetherington decided to include Chester as his co-author in order to avoid having to retype the entire paper. The cat co author needed a fancier name than just Chester if he was going to be cited in the Physical Review, so he was then dubbed FDC Willard. The FDC stands for "Felis Domesticus, Chester" and Willard was Chester's father's name.
Besides just the problem of having to re-type the paper, Hetherington had other motives for not wanting to add a human author, including payment and reputation concerns, and he thought it might be good for publicity to have a cat co author.
The article was published, and FDC Willard became a published physicist at age 7! Soon after, a visitor came looking for Hetherington and when he found that he was away, he asked to speak to Willard. When everone laughed, the "cat was out of the bag"! TodayIFoundOut says that the cat author became even more public when Hetherington was signing copies of the paper and included Chester's paw print as the signature of FDC Willard. One of those signed copies was sent to phyicists who were planning a conference, who then declined to include Chester or Hetherington in their plans.
This scientist cat also published a solo work when he was 12, and in French no less! F D C Willard was not only a physicist, he was also bilingual! That's one smart kitty! TodayIFoundOut says that this paper in actuality was written by a collective of French and American scientists who couldn't agree on certain points. It was time for F D C Willard to save the day again. By making him the sole author, no human scientist would be blamed for any faults in the paper.
You can even check out F.D.C. WIllard's Google Scholar page, complete with links to his articles! Maybe I could get one of my cats to explain them to me!
FDC Willard passed away in 1982, and while he might not really have been a cat scientist, his legacy lives on in the world of physics!
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