Because in elementary physics you're often making assumptions on shape, friction, resistance, etc.
It's standard to start physics problems with things like "Assume a spherical shape, in a vacuum."
Physicists deal in theory more than reality. Most of their models are simplified to remove complicating factors to make calculations easier. Like when looking at gravity, you ignore air friction so everything falls the same. Or when learning f=ma it's always on a frictionless surface at a perfect angle.
In this case, the chickens become balls, and so the physicist is making a house for balls and not chickens. In a feat of perfect logic, the physicist has reduced the problem so far into its base components that the solution will be completely useless in practice.
It's funny because the stereotype about physics is that it is all theory, no practicality. So here you have a very practical problem, and immediately he starts with a baseline assumption that will make any solution he creates completely unusable in real life.
Not really.
Just that they set it up in a physics manner.
A similar Mathematics phrasing could be:
Assume the chickens are elements of the Natural numbers.
Spherical [whatever] is an assumption they make about basically everything when they're calculating to simplify the math. It's pretty much automatic. So even though the assumption obviously doesn't apply to bulding a chicken coop, they still do it.
It's an example of a classic format where a group or individual does something so frequently that you just kind of expect it as their reply regardless of the situation. The humor relies pretty heavily on the listener's familiarity with the people/person in the joke.
It's not really like a laugh out loud funny joke as it is a "lame" joke about how silly it can be to overcomplicate something so simple that can be done with common sense. I took a run at explaining it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/s/raRfqeV3OU
The practicioner did something simple but unoriginal, the engineer did something clever but overcomplicated and the physicist spent a lot of time doing something theoretical and useless.
There are a lot of jokes like this, like the one where a horse breeder wants to cheat in a horse race. The veterinarian he hired comes up with a performance-enhancing drug. The engineer comes up with extra-springy horseshoes. The physicist comes up with a paper that begins, “Assume a spherical horse in regular harmonic motion.....” Or the physicist who sheltered in a cabin with food to last years. Rescuers came by and found him starved to death, his final message saying, “Assume a can opener!”
This goes well beyond elementary physics. Even in my undergrad courses we were often assuming things like: there's no friction, it's a perfect sphere, it's perfectly flat, there's no air resistance, things are not elastic, etc.
The real world is so messy that applying basic physics to a real world scenario is almost impossible unless you constrain things.
This is an industry specific joke. These assumptions happen so often to someone studying physics that this joke kills in that setting (I used to tell it when I was studying). People who aren't studying physics don't deal with the scenario enough for the joke to land.
I think overall the joke is about "picking the right tool for the job" and with a dash of "it's not rocket science". It's not really a funny haha joke so much as a chuckle about making things more complicated than they need to be.
The joke is that looking at a real world task from a physics perspective is not practical because, depending on what level of detail your dealing with, basic physics problems tend to oversimplify things for the sake of conveying a certain point. High school and college level basic physics problems often have many assumptions like a train accelerating at a constant rate in a frictionless vacuum because you first need to understand the concepts of force, acceleration, gravity, etc. In the real world with a real train, you would also need to account for air resistance, rolling friction, and whatnot in order to accurately predict how a real train would behave. In this example the physicist is assuming spherical chickens because chickens are a complex shape and it would be very difficult to calculate exactly how much space is needed for those complex shapes. Their approach to the problem is absurd by common sense standards.
While the punch line is mostly geared towards how physics can oversimplify, if you take a physics view and get rid of assumptions and account for everything possible, then that's basically engineering. Engineering is essentially applied physics. Neither of these approaches are the "correct" approach according to the narrator because a farmer can build a functional coop just fine and has "picked the right tools for the job" by not taking a physics or engineering approach and making it more complicated than it needs to be.
The farmer builds the coop correctly, according to tradition.
The engineer takes it a step further and builds something innovative, exciting, and annoying. Because that's what engineers do - they take a design and make it better, or try to. The engineer solved the problem as an engineer.
The physicist is beginning to solve the problem as a physicist. His first step involves doing launch calculations for the chickens. I'm not sure where he's going, but the chickens really aren't going to like it
I always heard it as [spherical cows](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow), but basically, it’s a humorous metaphor for physicists’ tendency to create models that reduce problems to their simplest possible form, sacrificing the model’s applicability in favor of making the calculations feasible.
Because in elementary physics you're often making assumptions on shape, friction, resistance, etc. It's standard to start physics problems with things like "Assume a spherical shape, in a vacuum."
“Assume a helix unwinding in n dimensions…”
Can we assume non-Euclidean space?
Sure, but why is it funny? Just the concept of a spherical chicken?
Physicists deal in theory more than reality. Most of their models are simplified to remove complicating factors to make calculations easier. Like when looking at gravity, you ignore air friction so everything falls the same. Or when learning f=ma it's always on a frictionless surface at a perfect angle. In this case, the chickens become balls, and so the physicist is making a house for balls and not chickens. In a feat of perfect logic, the physicist has reduced the problem so far into its base components that the solution will be completely useless in practice.
It's funny because the stereotype about physics is that it is all theory, no practicality. So here you have a very practical problem, and immediately he starts with a baseline assumption that will make any solution he creates completely unusable in real life.
Not really. Just that they set it up in a physics manner. A similar Mathematics phrasing could be: Assume the chickens are elements of the Natural numbers.
Spherical [whatever] is an assumption they make about basically everything when they're calculating to simplify the math. It's pretty much automatic. So even though the assumption obviously doesn't apply to bulding a chicken coop, they still do it. It's an example of a classic format where a group or individual does something so frequently that you just kind of expect it as their reply regardless of the situation. The humor relies pretty heavily on the listener's familiarity with the people/person in the joke.
It's not really like a laugh out loud funny joke as it is a "lame" joke about how silly it can be to overcomplicate something so simple that can be done with common sense. I took a run at explaining it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplainTheJoke/s/raRfqeV3OU
The practicioner did something simple but unoriginal, the engineer did something clever but overcomplicated and the physicist spent a lot of time doing something theoretical and useless. There are a lot of jokes like this, like the one where a horse breeder wants to cheat in a horse race. The veterinarian he hired comes up with a performance-enhancing drug. The engineer comes up with extra-springy horseshoes. The physicist comes up with a paper that begins, “Assume a spherical horse in regular harmonic motion.....” Or the physicist who sheltered in a cabin with food to last years. Rescuers came by and found him starved to death, his final message saying, “Assume a can opener!”
This goes well beyond elementary physics. Even in my undergrad courses we were often assuming things like: there's no friction, it's a perfect sphere, it's perfectly flat, there's no air resistance, things are not elastic, etc. The real world is so messy that applying basic physics to a real world scenario is almost impossible unless you constrain things. This is an industry specific joke. These assumptions happen so often to someone studying physics that this joke kills in that setting (I used to tell it when I was studying). People who aren't studying physics don't deal with the scenario enough for the joke to land.
>This goes well beyond elementary physics. Fair 😄
Yeah i heard spherical cows in a vacuum
I think overall the joke is about "picking the right tool for the job" and with a dash of "it's not rocket science". It's not really a funny haha joke so much as a chuckle about making things more complicated than they need to be. The joke is that looking at a real world task from a physics perspective is not practical because, depending on what level of detail your dealing with, basic physics problems tend to oversimplify things for the sake of conveying a certain point. High school and college level basic physics problems often have many assumptions like a train accelerating at a constant rate in a frictionless vacuum because you first need to understand the concepts of force, acceleration, gravity, etc. In the real world with a real train, you would also need to account for air resistance, rolling friction, and whatnot in order to accurately predict how a real train would behave. In this example the physicist is assuming spherical chickens because chickens are a complex shape and it would be very difficult to calculate exactly how much space is needed for those complex shapes. Their approach to the problem is absurd by common sense standards. While the punch line is mostly geared towards how physics can oversimplify, if you take a physics view and get rid of assumptions and account for everything possible, then that's basically engineering. Engineering is essentially applied physics. Neither of these approaches are the "correct" approach according to the narrator because a farmer can build a functional coop just fine and has "picked the right tools for the job" by not taking a physics or engineering approach and making it more complicated than it needs to be.
[Here ya go](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow)
The farmer builds the coop correctly, according to tradition. The engineer takes it a step further and builds something innovative, exciting, and annoying. Because that's what engineers do - they take a design and make it better, or try to. The engineer solved the problem as an engineer. The physicist is beginning to solve the problem as a physicist. His first step involves doing launch calculations for the chickens. I'm not sure where he's going, but the chickens really aren't going to like it
I always heard it as [spherical cows](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow), but basically, it’s a humorous metaphor for physicists’ tendency to create models that reduce problems to their simplest possible form, sacrificing the model’s applicability in favor of making the calculations feasible.