| Cats certainly aren't unknown in the world of physics. Isaac Newton had a cat named Spithead (and supposedly created a cat door for him), while Albert Einstein once said that only two things provided refuge from the misery of life: "music and cats." Of course, the most famous example is Schrödinger's cat, a thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger to explain the complexity of quantum superposition. But none of these cats, whether real or allegorical, has ever written an influential physics paper. That distinction belongs solely to F.D.C. Willard, a Siamese cat otherwise known as Chester. While it's fun to imagine Jack H. Hetherington — the paper's very human author — working alongside his cat to explore atomic behaviors at different temperatures, the reason for the feline's inclusion was actually a matter of pronouns. Before submitting his paper for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters back in 1975, Hetherington noticed that he'd used the royal "we" throughout his work, and a colleague informed him that the journal only used such verbiage when a paper had multiple authors. Unwilling to go back and change the entire paper (these were typewriter days after all), Hetherington instead invited Chester, under the more official-sounding pseudonym F.D.C. Willard, to be his collaborator. Hetherington's deception was baked right into the name: Felis Domesticus Chester Willard (Felis domesticus being the genus and species of the common house cat, and Willard being Chester's father's name). According to Hetherington, the journal's editors didn't find the feline contribution especially amusing, but time heals all wounds. In 1980, Willard even went on to become the sole "author" of a scientific paper in French. In 2014, Physical Review Letters granted free access to all cat-written physics papers as an April Fools' Day joke. | 
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