Interferometer Memes

Poor Morley spent decades building bigger and bigger interferometers looking for the aether, getting exactly zero results every single time. Fast forward to modern physics, and we're STILL building massive circular colliders hoping to find something new! From Morley's null results to CERN's "we need an even BIGGER ring" approach, physicists just can't stop making enormous circular machines when the universe refuses to cooperate. The scientific method at its finest: if your multi-billion dollar machine doesn't find what you want, just build a larger one! Because clearly, size matters in physics.

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."