An end-on view of a fibrous virus (Image: MIT Press) (Image: MIT Press)
THERE’S an old joke about the theoretical physicist who claims to have worked out the reason for a sudden drop in milk production at the local dairy farm. The biologist, ecologist and nutritionist all failed to solve the problem, and are curious to hear how it was done. “Well,” says the physicist, “consider a spherical cow…”. The joke is that physicists reduce problems to a simple form to ease their calculations, even if that makes their model irrelevant to the real world.
David Dusenbery has the…
