The Flying Pig Problems

Universities began admitting brilliant graduate students to work on flying pig problems. Governments awarded research grants. Companies recruited research scientists specializing in flying pig technologies.

The CS department established a large interdisciplinary research center, bringing together researchers from across campus. After all, realizing the flying pig vision was not a problem that CS alone could solve.

Social scientists began studying the societal implications of a future in which the sky was full of pigs; urban planners explored new transportation systems after a paper demonstrated that pigs could follow instructions and might one day carry passengers through the air; economists investigated the potential disruption to traditional markets. The list goes on and on.

The breakthrough finally came from the biology department.

After countless sleepless nights, a group of brilliant PhD students successfully bred pigs that could fly, drawing on principles of aerodynamics, biomechanics, and evolutionary biology.

What had begun as a fabricated scientific claim eventually became reality.

The once-imaginary flying pig could now fly. Decades of research had produced something genuinely useful. The original paper was still fraudulent, but nobody seemed particularly interested in that distinction anymore.

The researcher who had started it all was now celebrated as the father of flying pig research and widely regarded as a visionary.

So, is your research problem a flying pig problem (and how can you tell)?

Sometimes, the answer may not be important.