Fitting an elephant
“I’m not very impressed with what you’ve been doing.” As recounted the famous physicist Freeman Dyson himself, this is how Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi started their 1953 meeting. “Well, what do you think of the numerical agreement?”, Dyson countered. To which, Fermi replied “You know, Johnny von Neumann always used to say: With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk. So I don’t find the numerical agreement impressive either.” (Life Stories of Remarkable People)