When a Cat Co-Authored a Paper in a Leading Physics Journal (1975)

Back in 1975, Jack H.

早在 1975 年，杰克·H.

Het­her­ing­ton , a physics pro­fes­sor at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty, wrote a research paper on low–temperature physics for the respect­ed sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal Phys­i­cal Review Let­ters .

密歇根州立大学物理学教授赫瑟林顿为著名科学杂志《物理评论快报》撰写了一篇关于低温物理学的研究论文。

Before send­ing it off, Het­her­ing­ton asked a col­league to review the paper, just to make sure it cov­ered the right bases.

在发送之前，赫瑟林顿请一位同事审阅了这篇论文，以确保它涵盖了正确的基础。

What hap­pened next Het­her­ing­ton explained in the 1982 book, More Ran­dom Walks in Sci­ence :

接下来发生的事情 Hetherington 在 1982 年出版的《科学中的更多随机游走》一书中解释道：

Before I sub­mit­ted [the arti­cle], I asked a col­league to read it over and he said, ‘It’s a fine paper, but they’ll send it right back.’ He explained that that is because of the Edi­tor’s rule that the word “we” should not be used in a paper with only a sin­gle author.

在我提交[这篇文章]之前，我请一位同事读了一下，他说：“这是一篇很好的论文，但他们会立即将其退回。”他解释说，这是因为编辑的规定，在只有一个作者的论文中不应该使用“我们”一词。

Chang­ing the paper to the imper­son­al seemed too dif­fi­cult now, and it was all writ­ten and typed; there­fore, after an evening’s thought, I sim­ply asked the sec­re­tary to change the title page to include the name of the fam­i­ly cat, a Siamese called Chester, sired one sum­mer by Willard (one of the few unfixed male Siamese cats in Aspen, Col­orado).

现在把纸改成客观的似乎太困难了，而且都是写的和打印的；因此，经过一个晚上的思考，我只是要求秘书更改扉页，包括家里的猫的名字，一只名叫切斯特的暹罗猫，是威拉德（科罗拉多州阿斯彭为数不多的几只未固定的雄性暹罗猫之一）于一年夏天生下的后代。

I added the ini­tials F D in front of the name to stand for Felix Domes­ti­cus and thus cre­at­ed F D C Willard.

我在名字前面添加了缩写 F D 来代表 Felix Domesticus，从而创建了 F D C Willard。

The edi­tors even­tu­al­ly accept­ed the paper, “Two‑, Three‑, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3 He.” And the ruse last­ed until, remem­bers Het­her­ing­ton, “a vis­i­tor [came to the uni­ver­si­ty and] asked to talk to me, and since I was unavail­able asked to talk with Willard.

编辑们最终接受了这篇论文“bcc 3 He 中的二、三和四原子交换效应”。赫瑟林顿回忆道，这个诡计一直持续到“一位访客[来到大学]要求与我交谈，由于我没空，他被要求与威拉德交谈。

Every­one laughed and soon the cat was out of the bag.” (Pun sure­ly intend­ed.) Appar­ent­ly only the jour­nal edi­tors did­n’t find humor in the joke.

大家都笑了，很快就泄露了秘密。” （双关语肯定是故意的。）显然只有期刊编辑没有在这个笑话中找到幽默感。

Above, you can see F.D.C. Willard’s sig­na­ture (a paw print) on the front page of the arti­cle.

在上面，您可以看到 F.D.C.文章首页上有威拉德的签名（爪印）。

The web­site, Today­I­Found­Out, has much more on this enchant­i­ng lit­tle sto­ry.

TodayIFoundOut 网站上有更多关于这个迷人小故事的内容。

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如果您想支持开放文化的使命，请考虑向我们的网站捐款。

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Relat­ed Con­tent: The Short­est-Known Paper Pub­lished in a Seri­ous Math Jour­nal: Two Suc­cinct Sen­tences

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