アメリカンジョーク

I wanted to get this text file off my desktop, but I didn’t know where to put it, so I’m sharing it with the world.

I forget which article exactly, but a comment on Slashdot had the following physics joke:

A rich oil-baron hires a veterinarian, a statistician and a physicist to develop a method for predicting the outcome of a horse race. The three scientists disappear for a week and each returns with a different method; The vet states “I have studied the form, health and blood-lines of all the horses for the next race and can confidently say that number 7 is the best of the lot. Whether he wins on the day, is another question”. The Statistician boasts “I have studied the race histories of all the horses in the next race and all the races ran on this track and can definitely say that horse number 3 has a 85% chance of coming in the top 3″. The physicist then strides up to the baron and boldly proclaims “I have developed a way to predict the outcome of any race with 100% accuracy! First, one assumes that the horses are perfectly spherical and moving through a vacuum…”

Yep, that pretty accurately describes the two years of physics classes I’ve taken so far. The way it goes is, first you learn something. Then you learn that it doesn’t accurately represent the real world because of all the simplifying assumptions you made. Then you learn that the real answer is either impossible to calculate or nearly so. And yet we have amazing things like this here intarweb. Fantabulous.

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