Cute Scientific Papers

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Although there’s a tradition of some scientific papers having “Cute” and “Clever” titles (Like the one from the American Journal of Science about Baseball Physics entitled Looking into Chapman’s Homer[sup]1[/sup], some journals try to discourage this. Physical Review, for one, who once made someone I know change an article title because they thought he might be making a joke about the “Tri-State” area. Of course, this sort of thing just makes others try harder. Some of these cute papers are legendary:

  • The “Alpha, Beta, Gamma paper” by R. Alpher and George Gamow, who added Hans Bethe to the paper so it could be by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow[sup]2[/sup]

  • The “Knox, Knox, Hoose, Zare” paper published in the April 1 issue of Optics and Photonics News. A tongue-in-cheek paper about the achievement of a 0 femtosecond pulse. Wayne Knox (now director of the Institute of Optics in Rochester) got his father Robert to sign on (He was also a prof. at the U. of R.) along with two other appropriately-named guys.[sup]3[/sup]

  • Or the “Vincent, Van, Goh” paper [sup]4[/sup]

  • or the "Quick, Browne, Fox, and Hollins paper (I guess they HAD to acknowledge Hollins) [sup]5[/sup]

  • Or the case of the Chemistry (?) professor who cited his dog as a co-author. I don’t recall the details of this one.

  • Or the physicist I know who MADE UP A COLLABORATOR. My recollection was that he was a co-author, and was even a sole author on one paper. But when I’ve looked in the recent past I can’t even find his name on a paper. I DID find him in one footnote (cited as “private communication”) and he was thanked for his contributions at the end of another. But I don’t feel I can release the name yet.
    Any others?

1.American Journal of Physics 53, 849 (1985). Peter J. Brancazio
2. “The Origin of Chemical Elements” Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow, Phys. Rev. 73, 803 (1948)
3.“Observation of the 0-fs pulse” WH Knox, RS Knox, JF Hoose, RN Zare - Optics & Photonics News, Volume 1, Issue 4, April 1990, pp.44-54
4. "Ecological stability, evolutionary stability and the ESS maximum principle " T. L. Vincent , M. V. Van and B. S. Goh Evolutionary Stability Volume 10 Number 6 pp. 567-591 November 1996
5. “Interactions of N sub 2 Molecules Adsorbed on Smooth and Roughened Ni(111) Surfaces” A Quick, VM Browne, SG Fox, P Hollins Surf. Sci. 221:11, 48-60 (1989)

2

Those are great! I can’t add any cute conglomerations, but I can tell of one physicist whose initials and last name* by themselves* makes quite a cute reference any physicist would get, something like U.V. Light.

I was also reminded of the charming article by N. David Mermin describing how he got Lewis Carroll’s word “boojum” from the Hunting of the Snark into Physical Review Letters by badmouthing the Third Edition of Webster’s dictionary (which gave “boogum” as the preferred spelling) in a footnote. Evidently, the editor of PRL was no fan of the third edition and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to publish a footnote stating: “in this, as in many matters, the views of the 3rd edition should be spurned.”

3

I can’t contribute except to say that Concrete Abstracts is a fabulous journal title.

4

While I wasn’t deliberately “cute,” but a real collaboration, neurobiologists Paul Fatt and Bernard Katz published a number of articles together.