Spherical cow
The spherical cow is a humorous metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of complex phenomena.[1][2][3][4] Originating in theoretical physics, the metaphor refers to some scientific tendencies to develop toy models that reduce a problem to the simplest form imaginable, making calculations more feasible, even if the simplification hinders the model's application to reality.
History
The phrase comes from a joke that spoofs the simplifying assumptions sometimes used in theoretical physics.[5]
John Harte, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1965,[6] reported that he first heard the joke as a graduate student.[7] One of the earliest published references is in a 1970 article by Arthur O. Williams Jr. of Brown University, who described it as "a professional joke that circulated among scientists a few years ago".[8]
The story is told in many variants,[9] including a joke about a physicist who said he could predict the winner of any race provided it involved spherical horses moving through a vacuum.[10][11] A 1973 letter to the editor in the journal Science describes the "famous story" about a physicist whose solution to a poultry farm's egg-production problems began with "Postulate a spherical chicken".[12]
Cultural references
The concept is familiar enough that the phrase is sometimes used as shorthand for the entire issue of proper modeling. For example, Consider a Spherical Cow is a 1985 book about problem solving using simplified models.[7] A 2015 paper on the systemic errors introduced by simplifying assumptions about spherical symmetries in galactic dark-matter haloes was titled "Milking the spherical cow – on aspherical dynamics in spherical coordinates".[13]
References to the joke appear even outside the field of scientific modeling. "Spherical Cow" was chosen as the code name for the Fedora 18 Linux distribution.[14] In the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, a joke is told by Dr. Leonard Hofstadter with the punchline mentioning "spherical chickens in a vacuum", in "The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization" episode.[15] In the space gravity simulator educational video game Universe Sandbox, a spherical cow was added as a user-placeable object in March 2023.[16]
See also
- Assume a can opener, a joke about invalid assumptions in economics
- Amorphous globosus, a rare and fatal birth defect in cattle, producing a ball of underdeveloped tissue
- Fermi problem, efforts to produce very broad estimates
- Homo economicus, a hypothetical rational person
- Naïve physics, also called folk physics
- Schwarzschild metric, an exact solution of the Einstein field equations assuming a uniform spherical symmetric nonrotating uncharged mass in a vacuum
References
<templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" />
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ a b Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".
External links
- NASA:Exploration of the Universe Division – Supernova models as spherical cows
- Hubble Heritage Gallery Page: related history from Space Telescope Institute