Idealized models Memes

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!

Every physics student knows the pain. You're just trying to calculate how far a ball rolls down an incline, and suddenly there's a spherical cow standing in shallow water contemplating its existence. The perfect marriage of absurdist textbook assumptions and existential bovine crisis. Next problem: calculate the angular momentum if the cow decides it's actually a perfect sphere with uniform density. Show your work.

Physics professors love crushing dreams faster than objects fall in a vacuum. First day of class and they're already dismantling childhood myths alongside the laws of physics. "There is no Easter Bunny, there is no Tooth Fairy, and there is no air resistance in our calculations." Welcome to freshman physics, where ideal conditions exist only in textbooks and your GPA is about to experience significant gravitational acceleration.

Welcome to the idealized world of physics problems, where bears perform perfect parabolic motion across canyons. In reality, that bear would've faceplanted halfway through. Nothing says "theoretical physics" quite like pretending the universe isn't constantly trying to slow everything down. Those perfect sine waves of motion exist only in the pristine environment of our textbooks and the dreams of first-year physics students who haven't yet been crushed by reality. The real world is just sitting there, friction and all, waiting to disappoint you.

The classic physics bait-and-switch. Spend your childhood being fed simplified models where "air resistance can be ignored" only to discover that real-world physics is a chaotic hellscape of drag coefficients and turbulent flow. No wonder he looks betrayed. Every scientist remembers that moment when they realized their textbooks were just feeding them approximations to keep the math manageable. Next they'll tell us spherical cows aren't actually a thing.