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It's one of the reason I dislike physical terms that has words like "ideal" or "perfect" as their part. They subliminally suggest that their properties and behaviours are the "true" ones while the real material things are their imperfect counterparts whose imperfections you can sometime disregard.

Of course, it's exactly the opposite: it's those "ideal" concepts are imperfect approximations of the real things, omitting lots of details which sometimes are not that important but sometimes are absolutely crucial.

My personal favourite example is attaching a perfect source of voltage (zero internal resistance) to a perfect wire (zero resistance). You can't arrive to this scenario starting with the real world entities: both the battery and the wire will have non-zero resistances and depending on their proportions, you end up with approximating either one of those as zero, or none, but never both.




Hence the “perfectly spherical cow” joke.




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