Insomnia Memes

That moment when your brain decides 3 AM is the perfect time to contemplate one of physics' greatest unsolved mysteries! Magnetic monopoles (magnets with only north OR south poles) have never been definitively observed despite being theoretically possible. This is the physics equivalent of counting sheep, except instead of falling asleep, you're now wide awake questioning Maxwell's equations and wondering if Paul Dirac was onto something. The brain's ability to replace "I should sleep" with "let's ponder theoretical particles" is truly elite-level self-sabotage.

The eternal physics grad student struggle captured in its purest form! Sleep becomes optional when you're trying to understand the subtle differences between interferometer calculations. For the uninitiated, a Michelson/Mach-Zehnder interferometer is used to measure tiny phase differences by splitting light beams and recombining them to create interference patterns. The homework solutions probably just say "trivial exercise left to reader" while our sleep-deprived hero is desperately trying to figure out why his calculations are giving him complex eigenvalues instead of power measurements. Behind him, that whiteboard with hexagonal structures (probably graphene or benzene rings) and equations is basically the inside of every physicist's brain at 4am. The academic version of "I've made a terrible mistake."