[7] One of the earliest published references is in a 1970 article by Arthur O. Williams Jr. of Brown University, who described it as "a professional joke that circulated among scientists a few years ago".
[8] The story is told in many variants,[9] including a joke about a physicist who said he could predict the winner of any race provided it involved spherical horses moving through a vacuum.
[10][11] A 1973 letter to the editor in the journal Science describes the "famous story" about a physicist whose solution to a poultry farm's egg-production problems began with "Postulate a spherical chicken".
[14] In the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, a joke is told by Dr. Leonard Hofstadter with the punchline mentioning "spherical chickens in a vacuum", in "The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization" episode.
[15] In the space gravity simulator educational video game Universe Sandbox, a spherical cow was added as a user-placeable object in March 2023.