![]() ![]() Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum." ![]() The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. The phrase comes from a joke that spoofs the simplifying assumptions sometimes used in theoretical physics. The metaphor and variants have subsequently been used in other disciplines. Originating in theoretical physics, the metaphor refers to physicists' tendency to reduce a problem to the simplest form imaginable in order to make calculations more feasible, even if the simplification hinders the model's application to reality. The spherical cow is a humorous metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of complex phenomena. Comic of a spherical cow as illustrated by a 1996 meeting of the American Astronomical Association, in reference to astronomy modeling
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