35 Physics Memes And Posts That “Have Potential” To Make You Laugh, As Shared By This Online Group
This is probably one of the best pieces of edutainment you'll find online. Just think about it: it's physics—yeah, yeah, physics is hard, it's more or less mathematics on hardcore steroids—but it's wrapped into a meme format.
So, even if you do end up googling half the jokes and references, you'll be learning something along the way, so you win in any case! You cannot lose!
Anywho, there's a dedicated online community that operates under the subreddit r/PhysicsMemes and celebrates physics—the easiest and most common way to ruin your GPA the science that deals in nature, matter, and energy—by memeing the heck out of it.
Bored Panda went through r/PhysicsMemes to find the best of the best memes that not only have the potential to make you laugh, but to also educate you a tidbit. Scroll down, upvote, comment, share, all that jazz, you know the drill, and most importantly, enjoy!
More info: r/PhysicsMemes
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Math. Any level of math. There you have it. My mother was a CPA and my daughter is a PhD in biochemistry. Math gene skipped me totally
Load More Replies...anyone else have a list of 'to reads' that stares at you every day? when you finally get to cross one off the list.
Statistics. Not because it was hard. Because I realized exactly how useless it is.
Schrodinger never had a cat. That's why he had no idea if the cat was alive if he didn't look in the box. At 30 seconds past mealtime, you will know if the cat is dead or alive.
At 30 seconds past mealtime, my cat thinks it's already starved to death
Load More Replies...The morbidity of this thought experiment has always bothered me. He couldn’t have had a switch turn on/off a light instead of spilling a vial of poison to kill a cat? It’s pretty twisted.
That's the key flaw in the thought experiment: the cat counts as an observer to collapse the wave function. Only if the cat is dead does it not collapse until the box is opened.
i’ve seen this and the “Shut Up” literally makes me cackle everytime
Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip? - To get to the same side.
Load More Replies...*Usually* my professors say an 8x11 sheet of paper one sided, sadly they are too smart to be fooled by this. I guess I could get an 8 ft. by 11 ft. paper though
If they don’t specify what units they’re using, that’s on them.
Load More Replies...This is why I didn't take geometry, I couldn't remember all the damned formulas. I mean, how many times will I use that formula? Just give me the damned formula and I will do the math. Sheesh. Or calculus. Algebra, no problem, it was easy. But the rest, screw the formulas.
Sadly I remember this formula and I went to school for Microbiology...
Load More Replies...I always told my Calculus students that after a certain point the key was to (1) be able to recognize what formula you needed to look up and (2) know where to look it up. And if you're going to be using a certain formula quite frequently, it will memorize itself.
the only formula i remember is (s*360)2πr/mC(delta)t. the angle of the dangle is directly proportional to the heat of the meat.
We could use a book with basic formulae in highschool math physics and chemistry tests. You're not supposed to learn some V = 4 πr³ / 3 insanity by heart, but to learn how apply that info.
It is ok to lookup formula, especially if you are not sure and lives or big sum of money depends on it. The trick is knowing which formula you need and where to find it. And what numbers to put in.
I made a formula sheet sticker for the inside of my calculator case which looked like the basic operating instructions for the calculator.
"Twinkle twinkle little star circumference = 2(pi)(r). Fuzzy-wuzzy was a bear, area = (pi)(r squared)". I could never figure out a verse for volume though : (
I've seen medical doctors Google why a person is ill in the ED
I absolutely hate it when someone says "oh, that can't exist because yada yada." And I say "fergawdsake it's FICTION.' However, many, many future scientists and other of that ilk watched the original Star Trek and are now creating and have created the tech that they used. You cannot create something until someone thinks of it.
There's a difference between scientific fiction and fictional science.
Load More Replies...I'm a retired nurse and have the same problem watching movies or TV shows. Can't they at least try to get some degree of accuracy in medical procedures?
I disagree. My understanding of physics allows me to come up with better ways to do things in the movies. In turn, this gives me the ability to think about this movie in a different light. I think I get more from it than most people!
There's certainly a spectrum of reality accuracy in movies and people's tolerance for creative license varies. At one end is Ed Wood, who thought no one cared that set walls shook when a character closed a door, and at the other end is perfect attention to the accuracy of every detail so everything seems real. Where you fall on that spectrum will likely relate to your own knowledge base, but most people seem to get taken out of a movie by something they immediately recognize to be inaccurate. I'm only annoyed when people seem to habitually seek out inaccuracies with questionable knowledge to back up their claims. I get not wanting to be taken out of the show and it bothers me too when I am.
Truth. I try not to let it bother me and might if I'm compelled with something else in the movie but, c'mon, sometimes it's insane. I remember Armageddon and, as a rocket scientist, I almost rolled my eyes so much they couldn't come back. My (at the time) husband complained it was fiction and to let it go. Until the gattling gun they took to land on an incoming asteroid and blew through the side of their ship. It's not like the topic couldn't be handled intelligently (and was with Deep Impact about the same time). That's when he had to look at me and say, "Okay, that's stupid." I write novels. I'm totally pro fiction and fantasy and all that stuff (really!) but I hate having my intelligence insulted. And if, in my ignorance, someone points out something I get wrong, I bloody well fix it. Snatching someone from the story with a needlessly stupid mistake is a great way to ruin the experience for someone reading/watching. Don't do it.
One worse don't ever understand literature to a degree where you realize that you can predict the movie by what style of characters there are in example once you realize the protagonists always win and antagonist always lose (mostly) and the shift from good to bad and back to good your rarely surprised ever again
For me, part of the fun is annoying my family by going 'They wouldn't've survived that' or 'there is no way that would work'. There's a yt channel called CinemaSins which is basically that
As a historian I have a pretty hard time with anachronisms 20th century based costume dramas. Wrong hair, wrong shoes, and especially wrong language. Yeah, I know it's just fiction but I find it so distracting I can't enjoy the movie.
My dad who’s an engineer with a physics degree always says “explained” instead “invented” or “discovered”. It’s always been there just needs to be explained 🤷🏼♀️
He didn’t discover it either, he explained it/came up with a theory for why we’re not floating around. Discovering it would imply it is a substance or a force that is inconsistent across the planet, right? Explained.
The original double slit experiment was photons but it works with electrons too
Load More Replies...You're okay and not stupid. This is LITERALLY what some physics problems are set up as. "A women is riding in a box car on a set of wires while someone dangles from the car from a rope beneath. Plot the movements of the person dangling." Basically, physics problems are ridiculous and have no purpose.
Load More Replies...Shouldn't the rope be wrapped around the axel the other way, over the top and hanging down in the front? The way it is I think the cart would go backwards, hit the platform, and stop.
Not if the problem is "How long can Mary move forward on the wires until John hits the cart with his head?" ;)
Load More Replies...[Edit: I just saw Mika N already mentioned this.] Anybody else notice the rope is wrapped around the axle the wrong way? As the boy falls he would make the cart go backwards (or in this case, prevent if from moving). Maybe this was the concept that needed to be analyzed?
I'm not a physicist, but I would imagine in real life the woman in the cart wouldn't be in the cart for long with this setup.
Lol! I just imagined her flying over the front when the guy reaches the length of the rope, I hadn't even thought of that. I guess it depends some on their relative weights, but I would think the jolt from the sudden stop of his decent could do it.
Load More Replies...It's a long story, but one day (to calculate density and gravitational pull) I had to assume that a Canadian goose was a sphere.
So, the Earth is a cow. That'll make the flat-earthers heads explode. :D
I am a mathematics student who also does most physics courses abd I've literally been pouting in physics lecture because of the derivative/fraction bit
The peace du resistance. (Read with cheesy Monty-Python French accent.)
That's closer than a cow being a sphere honestly. Also, is there such a thing as a non-circular cylinder?
noot noot | edit: oh wow the post below right now is also noot noot
Physicists just understand that a circular cylindrical Penguin may be improbable but it's not impossible!!
There was an old woman who lived in a ball. She had so many children, she couldn’t feed them all.
"For physics purposes, the cow in this equation will be a sphere. The moon will also be a sphere, Conelley, put your God****d hand down, I'm in no mood for your c**p, today."
There's actually a house in my township that's round. It's the weirdest looking thing! LOL
This and Hawking radiation. Feel like I’m never gonna be able to wrap my head around these concepts.
Quantum spin dependent on measurement. Just wait until you get to helicity and chirality (and right-handed neutrinos).
We heard your disapproval, this denomination is confusing. So why not calling that a "magnetic dipole moment" when considering charged particles...? Oh, ok, wait a moment !
is it important in daily life? maybe. is it important to study? YESYESYESYES xD
Can we predict how it will completely alter technology in the future? Nope. But it might.
Load More Replies...What particle is this? That's like a quadrillion times longer than the Higgs...
Poor Tesla, always got screwed over
Load More Replies...As a maths phobic who managed to pass 2 semesters of college physics in my late 50s after managing only Ds in HS algebra, I remain amazed that I actually understand these formulae. (This does NOT, in any way, suggest that I will necessarily get the correct answer if presented with a scenario that includes actual numbers. That’s a whole ‘nother thing. *sigh*)
Obviously this "person" has never had a chocolate chip cookie with ice cold milk. THAT is perfection. Idijit
If it's so perfect, how come you want another after you've already had 23?
Load More Replies...Death of one is a tragedy..... but thermodynamics is just statistics !
I found when working on my degree that most scientists who write textbooks have only the barest concept of how to write a complete sentence, much less one that actually makes sense and includes only real words.
Students regularly doing the finger gun during an exam and concluding "Ok, the force goes this way".
You can use the cross product rule instead of left and right hand rules you can always do the finger curling stuff :)
Load More Replies...Any test involving magnetism or moments was always fun to watch. RHR flying everywhere. Like an entire classroom trying to grab an invisible "oh sh*t" bar Edit: a letter
Accelerator go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
So...I guess lesson here is don't ask a physicist to teach you to drive if you don't want to get completely confused and crash.
But do we have account for boundary layer air at supersonic speeds?
Load More Replies...Well, it's basically ~O(v²) But if you really think it through maybe you can make it O(log(v) !
For those who don't get it, this is the 2 slit experiment, a quantum mechanics experiment where you send a bunch of photons through 2 slits. The black dots on the back board represent where the photons hit, if you observe the photons before they go through the slits they land where you expect, in 2 lines as shown on the bottom, if you don't observe them then they land in the stripes above, since their probabilities weren't collapsed so they can end up in seemingly impossible patterns. This about the limit of my knowledge on it though, and I may've gotten some stuff wrong so don't quote me Edit: Correction from JMil, it's if you try and detect the photon going through one of the slits, not if you observe them before the experiment. Also, the pattern is caused by the photon seeming to interfere with itself as if it had gone through both slits. Read their reply below for more info from someone who knows more than me
It's an interference pattern (the superposition principle states the intensity of waves sums, causing constructive or destructive interference). This will happen even with a single photon at a time. Wave-particle duality. It is as if the particle interferes with itself when it's wave function "passes" through both slits. It is as if each slit is the source of a circular wave. However, if you observe the particle at the slit, the wave function collapses and restarts, so it is as if it did not pass through both slits simultaneously and only one circular wave propagates. Observation resets a particles wave function.
Load More Replies...Why were you downvoted? Have an upvote to balance it
Load More Replies...Many great scientists have been honored with many useful measurement units. Some of them, with not-so-useful units. The SAGAN, named after astronomer Carl Sagan, is the unit for "a generic large quantity of stuff, usually more than four billions of it". Scientist Paul Dirac, who was well known for his silent disposition, gave origin to the Dirac, a measurement that equals to 1 word/hour. Richard Greenblatt, the notorious american hacker and MIT scientist, upheld the myth of the... lack of hygiene in the IT community and went on to be honored with the "milliBlatt", a measurement of strong body odor.
And then, there is the "Lovelace", a measurement unit named after 1970s porn star Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat. The unit is meant to measure how much a software "sucks", and for very obvious reasons 1 Ll means it sucks a lot...
Load More Replies...you shall f**k up most of my peers grades thank you for making me look like the smartest kid in class.
is that the phone number of an Islandington flat where Arthur Dent attended a dinner party?
The resistor value is important in real life (there are 6 standards, I think), but there is also a so called resistor tolerance that could be up to +/-20%.
Load More Replies...take a 6 ohm resistor & work on it with a triangle file until it reads exactly what you want...
«Oh boy, I'll just have to make one then...» The other subtitle would be "Why fundamental physics studies last years or even decades?"
kaguya-samas love is war (i know better now thanks for the help on that other meme!)
Not for the purposes of this example. Also, assume both bodies are smooth bodied regular cylinders.
Load More Replies...Wouldn't it have fallen further in the top right pic if g were 10 rather than 9.8?
I don't think I'd ever call myself Donald Trump, even for a meme...
Maybe the "trump" could be a new unit for stupidity with 45 being the maximun level of trumps one could attain before death resulting from forgetting to breathe.
Load More Replies...90% of these went over my he--, who am I kidding 99% of these went over my head.
Good thing you were ducking, you wouldn't want these to hit you in head!
Load More Replies...This post really feels like a random collection of memes and pictures. I got most of the puns and jokes, but for people who never studied physics (or forgot what they were told in the high school years ago), it will be difficult to follow without having any context. I am sure that more BP readers would appreciate how good some of these memes are if the author of this article tried to do some more research.
the only physics class i took was in junior year of high school, & i failed it. i was still able to understand a lot of these memes & find them funny. & if you don't get them... that's fine too. they're just memes, it's alright to not understand every single meme you see :)
Load More Replies...90% of these went over my he--, who am I kidding 99% of these went over my head.
Good thing you were ducking, you wouldn't want these to hit you in head!
Load More Replies...This post really feels like a random collection of memes and pictures. I got most of the puns and jokes, but for people who never studied physics (or forgot what they were told in the high school years ago), it will be difficult to follow without having any context. I am sure that more BP readers would appreciate how good some of these memes are if the author of this article tried to do some more research.
the only physics class i took was in junior year of high school, & i failed it. i was still able to understand a lot of these memes & find them funny. & if you don't get them... that's fine too. they're just memes, it's alright to not understand every single meme you see :)
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