Great Things Happening At MIT

Look at that smug little face! When an atom loses an electron, it becomes positively charged (an ion) - but unlike humans who get negative when they lose something, atoms are just sitting there grinning about their new positive charge. Chemistry's greatest paradox: losing makes you more positive! Next time your phone battery dies, just remember it's not losing energy, it's just becoming more positive about life.

Student celebrates surviving calculus only to discover thermodynamics and fluid mechanics are waiting to crush their soul. Classic engineering curriculum trap. You think you've conquered the final boss, but it was just the tutorial level. Thermodynamics doesn't just break your spirit—it conserves that broken spirit and transfers it directly into anxiety. And fluid mechanics? That's just calculus wearing a trench coat filled with partial differential equations and boundary conditions.

Trying to explain theoretical wormholes without diagrams is like trying to describe a 4D object using interpretive dance. "So it's like... *wiggles hands frantically*... a tunnel that connects two points in spacetime by folding the universe like a cosmic burrito!" Meanwhile, your audience is mentally constructing something between a donut and a black hole with an identity crisis. The true paradox isn't the wormhole—it's thinking anyone can understand non-Euclidean geometry through verbal description alone!

String theorists don't just play with strings - they stretch your patience across multiple dimensions! While other physicists get excited about experimental validation in years or decades, string theorists casually drop the "centuries" bomb like they're ordering coffee. "One grand unified theory please, with extra dimensions... delivery time? Oh, just a few hundred years, no rush!" Meanwhile, particle accelerators everywhere are like, "Am I a joke to you?" String theory might be the only field where your great-great-great-grandkids could be writing your peer review!

That moment of scientific cross-disciplinary recognition that no one else gets. While physics students know Josiah Willard Gibbs for his work in optics, chemistry students worship him as the thermodynamics deity who gave us the Gibbs free energy equation. It's like spotting your favorite obscure band's t-shirt in public—except instead of music, it's equations that determine whether reactions are spontaneous. The silent nod of recognition while everyone else wonders why you're so excited about some random 19th-century dude.

Engineering students roasting each other only to discover they're all equally traumatized by statics problems! The meme brilliantly captures that moment when you realize stress and strain calculations have broken everyone's spirit. That final panel with the void-faced "no" is basically every engineering student at 3AM before the mechanics exam. The monkey's comeback is pure gold—turns out nobody can solve these problems without having an existential crisis first.