Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, October 1st, 2003
How empirical analyses provide but a limited perspective
A physicist was asked to advise a dairy farmer on ways to improve the productivity of cows. At their first meeting the physicist drew a large circle on his notepad and said to the farmer, "Let us consider a spherical cow." The farmer regarded this as a joke. The physicist, however, was serious; his tools-his methods of empirical analysis-when applied to a cow revealed that a sphere is an accurate representation of a cow. The puzzled farmer asked about the head, surely an important feature. The physicist thought about the matter, and aft...
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