Research cycle Memes

The endless regression of particle physics in one comic! Scientists start with "big rocks are fundamental" then smash them to find smaller rocks. Then those smaller rocks get smashed to find even tinier rocks. 10,000 iterations later, we're still asking what's truly fundamental while some grad student mutters "whatever was fundamental last week is a clerical error now." This perfectly captures the history of particle physics—from atoms to nuclei to quarks to... who knows what's next? The Large Hadron Collider is basically just a $10 billion rock-smashing machine where physicists keep finding increasingly bizarre subatomic particles and then arguing about whether they're "fundamental" until the next funding cycle.