Spherical Horse Moving Through a Vacuum

by Michael E Gorman, Alexandra Kincannon, Matthew M Mehalik · 2001
from Spherical Horses and Shared Toothbrushes: Lessons Learned from a Workshop on Scientific and Technological Thinking

A multimillionaire offered a prize for predicting the outcome of a horse race to a stockbreeder, a geneticist, and a physicist. The stockbreeder said there were too many variables, the geneticist could not make a prediction about any particular horse, but the physicist claimed the prize, saying he could make the prediction to many decimal places—provided it were a perfectly spherical horse moving through a vacuum.