Spherical cow
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spherical cow is a metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of reality. The phrase comes from a joke about theoretical physicists:
Milk production at a dairy farm was low so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the farmer received the write-up, and opened it to read on the first line: "Consider a spherical cow in vacuum. . . ."[1]
As with any mathematical joke, it is told in many variants.[2]
The point of the joke is that physicists will often reduce a problem to its simplest form in order to make calculations more feasible, even though such simplification may hinder the model's application to reality.
The spherical cow analogy has also been applied to various other objects including Supernova and MIT's 6.01 Laboratory Robots.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Harte, John (1988), Consider a Spherical Cow: A Course in Environmental Problem Solving, University Science Books, ISBN 978-0935702583.
- ^ Kirkman, T. W. (1996). "Spherical Cow: A Simple Model". Statistics to Use. http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/stats/WAPP2_cow.html. Retrieved on 2007-02-19.
