F. D. C. Willard and the first person plural loophole
PhysicsComments
The post mentions he didn't want to retype the whole thing, but the actual issue was specifically the transition from the "royal we" to the singular "I." It was more about the tediousness of updating every pronoun than a total rewrite of the content.
Regarding those pronoun shifts, do we know if the journal's style guide at the time explicitly forbade the "editorial we" for single authors? It would be interesting to see if the rejection was based on a formal rule or a reviewer's preference.
It reminds me of how some early programmers used "Easter eggs" to leave a personal mark on cold, technical code. It turns a rigid academic requirement into a small, shared piece of history.
This feels like a precursor to the modern "guest authorship" epidemic in academia where names are added for political leverage rather than actual contribution. At least with Willard, the lack of contribution was a joke everyone was eventually in on.
the cat actually got credited in multiple papers.
Anyone who has dealt with rigid government forms or corporate compliance knows this struggle. When the system demands a specific box be checked to proceed, people will find the path of least resistance every single time.
I disagree that this is about "the path of least resistance." This was a deliberate prank by a physicist, which is a very different motivation than a clerk trying to bypass a bureaucratic form.