Reddit Memes

Trying to learn actual chemistry on Reddit but finding everyone obsessed with glassware sizes instead? Talk about missing the reaction! 🧪 The internet chemistry community has this hilarious obsession with comparing round-bottom flask sizes like they're trophies. Meanwhile, newcomers are just standing there like "I just wanted to understand acid-base reactions..." The ultimate lab equipment flex nobody asked for! Fun fact: Those round-bottom flasks (properly called "boiling flasks") are designed that way to distribute heat evenly during reactions. But apparently their true purpose is serving as internet clout in chemistry forums!

The quintessential chemistry meme collection, dissected: Fluorine, the electron-hungry element that would probably steal your wallet if it could. Just needs one more electron to complete its octet and achieve inner peace. Safety goggles for mixing NaCl and H₂O? That's like wearing a hazmat suit to eat a sandwich. Classic first-year lab student energy. The molecular structure diagram - guaranteed to be shared by someone who just discovered ChemDraw and thinks benzene rings are personality traits. And the pièce de résistance: labeling explosive alkali metal and toxic gas as "DANGEROUS!!!!" but their combined product (table salt) as "Harmless :)" - the chemistry equivalent of a dad joke that somehow never gets old. Honestly, if you laughed at these, you're either a chemistry major or someone who still remembers high school chemistry trauma. Either way, I respect your choices.

When your entire chemistry knowledge consists of "water is H2O" and "don't mix bleach with ammonia," but you're desperately trying to blend in with the advanced chemistry crowd! It's like showing up to a quantum mechanics conference armed with nothing but the ability to spell "atom." The intellectual impostor syndrome is strong with this one - nodding along to discussions about organometallic compounds while internally screaming "WHAT IS A VALENCE ELECTRON AGAIN?!" The chemistry community has layers deeper than the periodic table, and here we are, still trying to remember if sodium is Na or NaCl. The struggle is molecular, friends!

This meme is a brilliant fusion of gaming culture and quantum chemistry. It shows the various shapes of f-orbitals (those weird-looking electron probability distributions that haunt physical chemistry students) with the caption "Reddit, when a chemist dies." The joke references the gaming meme "Press F to pay respect" - a funeral scene from Call of Duty where players press the F key to show respect. But here, it's "Press F orbital " because, well, chemists don't deserve normal respects. We get quantum mechanical respects. Thirty years of teaching and I still can't get students to remember these orbital shapes, but somehow they never forget that stupid video game reference. If only I could harness that power for my final exam...