Welcome to Erin Mankie's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm

and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

The job of a research scientist can be pretty thankless.

For every major breakthrough in miracle cure, there are countless studies conducted that

go nowhere, yield, middling results, or fly under the radar.

But those studies and the documentation of them are necessary if we ever hope to move

science forward.

Yet, in 1975, one scientist and his assistant authored a paper that didn't just influence

the field of physics, it made one of them famous for years to come.

Jack H. Heatherington taught physics at Michigan State University back in the 1970s.

He'd been studying how helium behaved when subjected to different temperatures and

wrote a paper on his findings.

He'd done all the work himself, but when he gave the paper to a colleague for their

opinion, they noted something odd about how it was written.

Heatherington kept referring to WE instead of I throughout the paper.

He had his reasons, of course.

For one, Egos were high in the scientific community.

If a paper shared multiple authors, one author couldn't stand above the others and gain

...