 Galilean idealizations are ones that involve deliberate distortions: physicists build models consisting of point masses moving on frictionless planes; economists assume that agents are omniscient; biologists study isolated populations; and so on. Using simplifications of this sort whenever a situation is too difficult to tackle was characteristic of Galileo’s approach to science. For this reason it is common to refer to ‘distortive’ idealizations of this kind as “Galilean idealizations” (McMullin 1985). An example for such an idealization is a model of motion on an ice rink that assumes the ice to be frictionless, when, in reality, it has low but non-zero friction.