The Citation Technique Is So Real

The eternal struggle of physics professors everywhere! Top panel shows a student proudly displaying their spherical cow - physics' most beloved approximation. "Let's assume this cow is a perfect sphere in a vacuum..." Meanwhile, the professor below is DONE with hearing this joke for the n-th time (where n approaches infinity). Every physics class has that one student who thinks they're the first person to ever make the spherical cow joke, completely unaware that it's been circulating since Newton was getting bonked by apples. The pain in that professor's eyes? That's the accumulated suffering of hearing "consider a spherical cow" in every thermodynamics lecture since the dawn of time!

The naïve enthusiasm of first-year chemistry students before organic chemistry crushes their souls. There's the train of reality coming to demolish those dreams while they're still picking flowers on the tracks. Every chemist remembers that brief honeymoon period before they discovered that carbon can form over 10 million compounds, each with their own sadistic reaction mechanisms waiting to be memorized. The flower represents that one simple reaction you understood before the professor introduced stereochemistry and suddenly your brain melted faster than sodium in water.

The Jedi Council of Mathematics strikes again! Number 1 is getting absolutely roasted here for meeting the technical definition of a prime number (only divisible by 1 and itself) but still being denied the honor. It's like showing up to the elite mathematician party with the right credentials and getting bounced by the bouncer. For those who skipped number theory class to play video games: prime numbers are those divisible only by 1 and themselves. But mathematicians specifically exclude 1 from this club through a special clause—basically mathematical gerrymandering. Poor Number 1, forever the outcast despite technically qualifying. Talk about gatekeeping!

The eternal academic civil war! Chemists apparently can't get along with anyone in the scientific community. They're feuding with physicists (who think chemistry is just "applied physics"), biologists (who view chemicals as either useful tools or environmental hazards), engineers (who simplify complex chemical reactions to "black box" processes), and mathematicians (who can't understand why chemists don't just solve everything with elegant equations). But the real kicker? Even chemists can't stand other chemists! Organic chemists think inorganic chemists are boring, physical chemists think everyone else is just mixing colored liquids, and analytical chemists judge everyone's sloppy lab techniques. It's the scientific equivalent of the Simpsons' Groundskeeper Willie declaring that "Scots ruined Scotland!"

Marvel thinks getting a few superheroes together is impressive? Please. Physics assembled the greatest minds in quantum mechanics at the 1927 Solvay Conference and fundamentally changed our understanding of reality itself. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, Planck—this is what happens when the universe's actual superheroes get together. No CGI budget required, just pure intellectual firepower that gave us quantum mechanics, relativity, and the mathematical framework of our existence. The only "infinity stones" here were the infinite questions about the nature of reality they were solving.

The defense industry's unofficial recruitment strategy in one perfect meme. Nothing says "qualified candidate" like someone who slept through the ethics portion of their degree! The beautiful irony is that failing the class designed to teach you right from wrong might actually be the perfect qualification for building weapons. Talk about failing upward—your moral compass might be broken, but your career trajectory is looking mighty fine. Next stop: designing things that go boom while your conscience takes a permanent vacation.