In early summer, 1996, milk production at a Wisconsin dairy farm was very low. The farmer wrote to the state university, asking help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, and gathered a national convention in Madison to address the problem. A few weeks later, the physicist phoned the farmer, "I've got the answer," he said, "But it only works when you consider spherical cows in a vacuum. . . ." Subsequent events are shrouded in neuralized mystery, but we do know that the first lunar migratory flight of spherical cows launched from the farm a few weeks later.