A cat signed a physics paper in 1975

Spring 1975. East Lansing, Michigan. Jack Hetherington, a physicist at the state university, finishes a paper on helium-3 at temperatures close to absolute zero. He has written it in the plural —"we measured", "we found"— and he is the only author.

Two days later. A colleague warns him: the journal he is aiming for, Physical Review Letters, corrects that plural when there is a single author, and correcting it means retyping the whole paper. This is 1975: there is no copy and paste.

That same afternoon. Hetherington takes the other way out and adds a second author: F. D. C. Willard, for Felis Domesticus Chester Willard. Chester is his Siamese cat, sired by a cat named Willard.

November 1975. The paper comes out with both names in volume 35 of the journal. Hetherington sends reprints to his colleagues: his own signature in ballpoint, Chester's as a paw print dipped in ink.

1980. Willard publishes on his own, in French, in the magazine La Recherche.

1 April 2014. The American Physical Society announces that papers signed by cats become freely available. The full list fitted into one name.