They Have Played Us For Absolute Fools

The evolution of your brain on physics YouTube! Starting with Kurzgesagt's adorable animations that make quantum mechanics feel like a bedtime story. Then Veritasium hits you with those "wait, everything I know is wrong?" moments that leave your neurons mildly confused but intrigued. But when you graduate to 3Blue1Brown? That's when your cerebral cortex starts shooting mathematical lightning bolts into the cosmos! It's like watching your brain transition from "I like science" to "I accidentally derived string theory while doing the dishes." The intellectual glow-up is real, folks!

The mathematical trauma is real! This meme perfectly captures that soul-crushing moment when you spend 20 minutes wrestling with a complex equation, only to discover it reduces to the utterly useless identity x=x. First comes the excitement of tackling the problem, then the methodical cancellations, followed by the creeping horror as variables start disappearing, and finally the existential crisis when you realize you've proven absolutely nothing. It's like climbing a mathematical mountain only to find yourself exactly where you started. Every math student knows this special flavor of disappointment that makes you question your life choices.

Mathematicians don't want to meet their descendants—they'd rather time travel to roast ancient Greek mathematicians who were this close to inventing calculus! Eudoxus's Method of Exhaustion (calculating areas by using progressively smaller shapes) was basically proto-calculus 2000 years before Newton and Leibniz. Modern mathematician is basically telling him "dude, you were RIGHT THERE, just needed to think about rates of change too!" The mathematical equivalent of watching someone solve 95% of a puzzle then walk away. Pure mathematician energy—more excited about theoretical breakthroughs than meeting actual humans from the future.

The eternal struggle of Greek letter notation in science and math! While the first two colleagues suggest subscript variations (Ω Ω and Ω o ), the third guy just cuts through the academic pretense with his... anatomical observation. But the real punchline? The lowercase omega (ω) actually does look like what he described! Physics and math professors everywhere are silently nodding in recognition. This is why scientists shouldn't be allowed to name things without supervision.

This flowchart is what happens when career counselors have a mental breakdown. Engineering? Only if you're "good with things." Chemistry? Congratulations on your future as a "fussy pedant." And let's not forget Computer Science, perfect for those who prefer "slow, indirect evil" over the more efficient varieties. The beautiful part is how it nails the existential crisis of every STEM student. "Why do you want to major in a STEM field?" Options include "curiosity" (adorable), "to save the planet" (delusional), or my personal favorite, the dawning realization that STEM was supposed to involve actual plants for Biology majors. After 30 years of teaching, I can confirm this is approximately 87% accurate. The missing 13% is the path where you choose your major based on which department has the least uncomfortable chairs in the lecture hall.

The eternal battle between infinities! In mathematics, infinity is a well-defined concept that we can actually work with—we have countable infinities, uncountable infinities, and even hierarchies of infinities thanks to set theory. But physics? That's where infinity becomes the final boss that makes physicists wake up screaming at night! Infinities in physics equations usually signal that your theory is breaking down somewhere. Black hole singularities, the beginning of the Big Bang, quantum field theory calculations—they're all battlegrounds where physicists desperately try to tame these mathematical monsters. The meme perfectly captures how mathematicians confidently wield infinity like a tiny sword while physicists face it as an incomprehensible cosmic horror. Next time your physics professor starts sweating when infinity appears in an equation, you'll know exactly why!