Always Has Been... Nuclear Safe

This textbook perfectly captures the moment when physics education crosses into absurdity. Behold the "Fleming's right-hand rule" illustrated with what appears to be a dislocated hand gesture that no human can naturally make. Thirty years of teaching and I've never seen a student successfully contort their fingers this way without needing medical attention afterward. The magnetic field, current, and motion vectors are all there, but the hand model looks like it's simultaneously throwing gang signs and having a stroke. No wonder students hate electromagnetism - they think they need to break their fingers to understand it.

Engineers getting hot and bothered by that underdamped step response curve! The system clearly likes to overshoot before settling down... just like my ex. That initial spike followed by those sensual oscillations? Pure control theory foreplay. If your PID controller can't handle these curves, maybe you should stick to theoretical physics instead of engineering. The real question is: do you prefer your system critically damped (boring but efficient) or underdamped (exciting but risky)? Choose your engineering kink wisely!

The crushing disappointment when you discover that your beloved SI units aren't actually based on universal constants but are just as made-up as imperial measurements! That adventurer spent 15 years searching for the ultimate measurement truth only to find out we're all just playing a cosmic game of "let's agree these numbers make sense." The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the North Pole to the equator—which is basically saying "we picked a random fraction of an arbitrarily-sized planet." Even with modern redefinitions using light and quantum mechanics, we're still just picking convenient reference points. Metric zealots in shambles right now.

Physicists splitting their personality between two realms of reality! On one side, we've got the neat, predictable meadow of Newtonian physics where apples fall and planets orbit in perfect mathematical harmony. On the other side? The psychedelic nightmare dimension of quantum physics where particles are like "Maybe I'm here, maybe I'm there, maybe I'm EVERYWHERE until you look at me, then I'll decide." It's basically physics having an existential crisis. No wonder Schrödinger needed that cat – he was trying to make sense of this madness!

The duality of physics students everywhere! That moment when you first grasp Gauss's Law and realize you can calculate electric fields without those nasty vector calculus integrals? Pure joy! Just enclose your charge in a symmetric surface, and poof - the math simplifies beautifully. But then reality hits harder than a particle accelerator: try applying it to anything that's not a perfect sphere, infinite cylinder, or flat plane, and suddenly you're back to complicated integrals. The universe giveth elegant mathematical shortcuts, and the universe taketh away when your professor assigns problems with weird-shaped charge distributions.

The eternal philosophical crisis of physics in one glorious meme! On the left, we have the pragmatic physicists with their "shut up and calculate" mantra, content with mathematical models that work without needing deeper meaning. Meanwhile, the unhinged philosopher on the right is having an existential meltdown, demanding answers to the universe's shape, the unmoved mover, and what kicked off eternal inflation—all while threatening violence if denied philosophical satisfaction. This brilliantly captures the tension between instrumental and realist views in physics. The "shut up and calculate" approach (popularized by physicist David Mermin) lets us make amazing predictions without worrying if quantum wavefunctions are "real." But some questions keep physicists up at night, desperately waving metaphorical shotguns at the cosmos demanding deeper truths!