In 2013 Caltech officials accused physicist Prof. Sandra Troian of misconduct when she named her cat, M. Pucci, as a coauthor on an abstract for an American Physical Society Meeting in 2012. This is all part of a larger scandal, and a much larger story, but really Caltech has also missed the long established interaction/collaborations of physicists and cats. It isn’t just Schrödinger’s cat, who may or may not have given its life for the cause of quantum mechanics.
In fact, it is pretty clear that physicists have had collaborations with cats for quite some time now. Jack H. Hetherington, of Michigan State University, published in 1975 some of his research results with F.D.C. Willard in the extremely prestigious physics journal Physical Review Letters. F.D.C. Willard was Hetherington’s cat Chester. The paper was article entitled "Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc ³He", and authored by J.H. Hetherington and F.D.C. Willard [Phys. Rev. Lett. 35, 1442–1444 (1975)]. Chester was somehow also persuaded to sign (with a paw obviously) some reprints of the paper in question, and according to some lore, was actually invited to give a talk or two on that science. Chester went on with his scientific career to publish F. D. C. Willard: “L’hélium 3 solide. Un antiferromagnétique nucléaire”, La Recherche, Nr. 114, 1980 before his death. What a great physicist !
The American Physical Society (the society of physicists that owns the journal Physical Review Letters) is quite proud of having shown leadership in publishing the work of Chester the cat with the announcement (April 1, 2014) that “APS is proud to announce a new open access initiative designed to further extend the benefits of open access to a broader set of authors. The new policy, effective today, makes all papers authored by cats freely available.........” noting that “Not since Schrödinger has there been an opportunity like this for cats in physics.” Cannot Caltech rise to the open minded view held by the American Physical Society and recognize that, in physics at least, such wider authorship is now well established and accepted ?
Cats figure in physics more frequently than one might expect in other ways. Nature Communications just last year reported “first experimental demonstration of the recently predicted “quantum Cheshire Cat”” [Nature Communications 5, 4492 (2014); doi:10.1038/ncomms5492]. There are also many monographs in physics trying to address the problem of how cats land on their feet when dropped upside-down from rest. The question is how cats right themselves without violating the conservation of angular momentum. Someone has even found a cat who has agreed to help address this question [look for GiGi the stunt cat on the web] without any revenge killing of any physicists (if I tried this type of experiment with my cat, my cat would kill me).
The fact of the matter is that cats instinctively know how to solve Lagrangians: a fancy name for an equation to describe motion. And cats know Newton’s laws better than most undergraduates. As any cat owner (cat servant) knows: a cat at rest will tend to remain at rest, unless acted upon by some outside force. And cats do experiment with electrostatics all the time (at least those cats that interact with fur rugs in dry climates). I point out all of this to my students frequently – although my cat is far too regal and far too aloof to stoop so far as to engage in the mundane task of teaching physics.