Cylindrical penguin Memes

Physics textbooks exist in their own special dimension where penguins are perfect cylinders and cows are spherical. Nobody asked for these simplifications, yet there they are, teaching generations of students that air resistance is negligible and pulleys are frictionless. Next time your experiment fails, remember it's not you—it's just that reality refuses to be a well-behaved mathematical model. Those of us who've spent years in the lab know the truth: the universe is held together by duct tape and statistical error bars.