A prestigious physics paper was co-authored by a Siamese cat

A prestigious physics paper was once co-authored by a Siamese cat for a very key reason in 1975. And no, we're not joking.

Professor Jack Hetherington wrote a three-page paper on the unusual behaviour of the isotope helium-3, reports IFL Science.

He wanted to submit it to Physical Review Letters but a colleague noticed he had used 'we' instead of 'I' throughout and while some journals would accept the use of 'we', this one did not.

This was in an age when making changes to a document was a lot more difficult once it had already been written and that left Hetherington with a key choice.

He could either retype, add another author or submit to another journal and as the equations and graphs included would make it tricky to rewrite, he decided to add another author.

Hetherington did not want to share credit with a colleague who had not contributed to the paper - so he gave a co-author credit to his Siamese cat named Chester using the alias F.D.C. Willard (Chester's father's name was Willard and F.D.C. stands for Felis domesticus Chester).

Professor Jack Hetherington's Siamese cat called Chester, like the one pictured, has a credit on one of his physics papers / ihhi, iStock

The paper is called Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc ³He and studies helium-3 which becomes a superfluid when cooled to temperatures near absolute zero (-273°C or -459.4°F) although it is a gas at anything close to room temperature.

Hetherington, and Willard, studied the behaviour when instead of trillions of helium-3 atoms, there were just two to four, and were able to explain some key observations.

They considered the circumstances both when the helium had been cooled to less than two thousandths of a degree above absolute zero to become solid and at modestly higher temperatures.

The four-atom scenario is complex because helium-3 can form four atom rings in either folded or planar form and the study found their modelling of the folded ring's behaviour fit observations that others had made while the planar did not.

Hetherington and Willard also found another unusual characteristic of helium-3 in that in a low or zero magnetic field, helium-3 can experience very rapid entropy increases without changing state from solid to liquid, or liquid to gas.

Their paper is open access in Physical Review Letters.

How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.