Spherical cow

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A spherical cow is a funny metaphor for a highly simplified scientific model of a complicated real-life phenomenon. The implication is that theoretical physicists will often reduce the problem to the simplest form they can imagine to make calculations more feasible, although such simplifications may hinder the application of models to reality.

This phrase comes from a joke that deceives the simplification assumptions that are sometimes used in theoretical physics.

Milk production on dairy farms is low, so farmers write to local universities, asking for help from academics. A multidisciplinary team of professors is gathered, led by theoretical physicists, and two weeks of intensive investigation on-site. The scholars then returned to the university, the notebook crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Soon, the physicist returned to the farm, telling the farmer, "I have the solution, but it only works in the case of a ball cow in a vacuum".

Told in many variants, including a joke about a physicist who says he can predict the winner of every race as long as it involves a round ball moving through a vacuum or a physicist whose solution to the problem of poultry farm production begins "Postulates a chicken spherical..." as presented in a 1973 letter to the editor of the journal Science entitled A Spherical Chicken .

Alan Turing, in his 1952 paper "Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" confirms that: "a system that has spherical symmetry, and whose circumstances change due to chemical reactions and diffusion... can not produce organisms like horses, which are not symmetric spherical."

Video Spherical cow

In popular culture

• In an episode of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory , the joke is told by Dr. Leonard Hofstadter with his punchline that mentions "round chicken in a vacuum".
• Consider Spherical Cattle is the 1988 book title on problem solving using a simplified model.
• "Cow Spherical" is selected as the code name for the Fedora 18 Linux distribution.

Maps Spherical cow

See also

• Assume a can opener
• Fermi Problems
• NaÃÆ'¯ve physics
• Unobtainium

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References

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External links

• NASA: Exploration of the Universe Division - Supernova model as a ball cow
• Hubble Heritage Gallery Page: related history from the Space Telescope Institute

Source of the article : Wikipedia