Interesting Facts
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.
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It's a factAs part of Operation Acoustic Kitty, the CIA implanted a microphone and a radio transmitter inside a cat to spy on Cold War adversaries. But the project quickly hit a dead end, with a now-unclassified document stating the obvious problem: “Cats are not especially trainable.”
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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The Norse goddess of fertility ______ rode in a chariot pulled by two tomcats.
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The Norse goddess of fertility Freyja rode in a chariot pulled by two tomcats.
In 1963, France sent the world’s first (and still only) cat to space.
On October 18, 1963, a Parisian stray cat named Félicette began her spacefaring journey aboard a French rocket launched from the Sahara Desert. The black-and-white cat was chosen from a crew of 14 cats trained for the mission, and she quickly traveled from the surface nearly 100 miles skyward, far beyond the Kármán line that separates Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. After becoming the first cat to escape the gravitational embrace of Earth, Félicette parachuted back to the planet’s surface. There, she was recovered by helicopter (still very much alive); the entire trip lasted only 15 minutes. Today, few people know about Félicette’s epic journey, as it’s often overshadowed by the 1957 flight of the Soviet space dog Laika. To commemorate the one and only astrocat’s achievements, a 2017 Kickstarter campaign raised £43,323 to create a memorial to Félicette. Today, the bronze statue — featuring Félicette perched atop the globe — resides at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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