#oho physics

The Solvay Conference of 1911 served as a pivotal moment in the history of physics, establishing a historiographical divide in twentieth century physics between the classical and modern eras. Founded by Belgian industrialist Ernst Solvay at the behest of chemist Walther Nernst, the conference brought leading researchers and scientists to Brussels to present on new findings in Radiation and Quanta.

At the time, Albert Einstein, one of the youngest members to attend, did not find the conference useful, though it paved the way for future gatherings, especially after Niels Bohr and Arnold Sommerfeld's work on the structure of atoms. By the time of the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927, 17 of the 29 attendees were or would become Nobel Prize winners.

There is a joke told by physicists in which a farmer asks a theoretical physicist to help him increase milk production to combat falling prices. After a few weeks of tackling the problem, the physicist asks the farmer to attend his afternoon’s theory seminar, as his solution is more complicated than he originally thought. At the seminar, the physicist draws a circle on the board and says “First, we assume a spherical cow,” much to the confusion of the farmer.

Cows, of course, are not spherical, and the use of generalities and fictional models to explain real events is a strategy used frequently in many of the sciences. However, these practices differ greatly between the fields, especially between physics and biology.