In college I had a professor who joked about making **assumptions to simply problem solving using an idealized case** by referring to it as "as spherical chicken in a vacuum". A kinematics problem about a chicken shot out of a catapult would be difficult to *actually* solve, but the idealized "Spherical chicken in a vacuum" reduces to the simplified formula for distance of travel given an angle & speed of launch. Sometimes it's okay to use a spherical chicken in a vacuum - other times it's very much not. [[Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom Pyramid|Wisdom]] in the sciences is knowing when you can make which simplifying assumptions. It (probably) arrives from experience with [[Empirical]] results observed against theoretical, algorithmically-generated projections, over time. Come to think of it, this is also a case of [[All Models are Wrong, Some Models are Useful]]. **** # More ## Source - college - I tried finding where my professor got it from but came up empty