Academia Memes

The progression of physics education in one perfect meme! Starting with the innocent "clock pendulum" description that your grandma might use, we rapidly descend into the physics underworld. By the time you reach "harmonic oscillator in the horizontal axis," you're deep in junior-year physics territory. But the final boss? "Single ball Newton's cradle" - that's the kind of galaxy-brain observation that makes physics professors either burst into tears or slow-clap in appreciation. It's the academic equivalent of watching someone evolve from "water is wet" to "dihydrogen monoxide exhibits adhesive properties due to hydrogen bonding." This is precisely why physics students develop eye twitches by senior year!

The perfect encapsulation of physics forums in the wild. Top half: Self-proclaimed geniuses spouting nonsensical word salads with just enough technical jargon to sound plausible to the untrained ear. "Gravitonic orbifold" and "rotating imaginary numbers" is peak pseudoscience babble that would make Feynman roll in his grave. Meanwhile, the bottom half shows the brutal reality of physics careers - from the desperate 8th grader already stressing about string theory to the PhD who's completed 7 postdocs only to end up mixing drinks. That "thinking of dropping college and moving to Alaska" hits with the precision of a quantum measurement. The duality of physics communities: theoretical nonsense from those who know nothing, existential crises from those who know too much.