Tomorrow Elephant

Mark Trodden of the excellent Cosmic Variance physics blog has compiled a fun list of reasons to study physics. My favourite is the first one:

To gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles that govern our universe and everything in it, while at the same time picking up a broad and eminently useful skillset —- the ability to analyze and deconstruct problems, and to effectively communicate solutions.

This is important. But being able to model cows as spheres is also important.

Note added: José says:

The spherical cow joke is ancient. I heard it from Tom Greytak who taught undergraduate quantum mechanics at MIT. This was the way he prefaced the quantum mechanical solution of the hydrogen atom… and it was not a mathematician, but a theoretical physicist who said “Consider a spherical cow…”

The point of the joke is not to show that mathematicians are divorced from reality but on the contrary, to highlight the sort of approximations one has to do in Physics in order to get a handle on it.