Oh, it was a meandering conversation. Really, it revolved around what the implications were if one neglected the core such that it was a valid premise. How woul

Oh, it was a meandering conversation. Really, it revolved around what the implications were if one neglected the core such that it was a valid premise. How would you torture a model of the earth to allow a person to compensate for not bothering to keep track of the core in a model? Gravity is the most obvious start, which you can get away with some perverse shell geometries (which has the added benefit of ruining the shape of the planet). And there's all manner of heat and magnetics (I think we largely assumed those were also neglectable, which in retrospect is poor planning due to solar wind). It wandered like that. It was a direct result of our introduction to modeling in the early core engineering courses. Wherein we abuse the power of deciding what gets into the model. (It all started with one person noting that we frequently neglect gravity in electrical engineering.)