Especially when they get older, they try to apply the 'make a cow a sphere of water, one meter in radius' trick all sorts of other areas. The issue is that they can't deal with 'history' in real life. Most of life is chaotic and the initial conditions and stochastic nature of the world make it almost impossible to predict anything. Not all things can be made into neat theories, in fact, it's a miracle that anything does fit into neat little theories. Physicists don't like that. Typically, they start throwing around all sorts of math-y sounding words when they realize that their 'model' won't work at all (Oh, just take the Hamiltonian, that'll solve it). If that still doesn't work, they make an excuse to go to a bar as soon as possible.
https://xkcd.com/793/ (scroll over text is on point here)
Especially when they get older, they try to apply the 'make a cow a sphere of water, one meter in radius' trick all sorts of other areas. The issue is that they can't deal with 'history' in real life. Most of life is chaotic and the initial conditions and stochastic nature of the world make it almost impossible to predict anything. Not all things can be made into neat theories, in fact, it's a miracle that anything does fit into neat little theories. Physicists don't like that. Typically, they start throwing around all sorts of math-y sounding words when they realize that their 'model' won't work at all (Oh, just take the Hamiltonian, that'll solve it). If that still doesn't work, they make an excuse to go to a bar as soon as possible.