Mfw The Professor Says Phasor

The ultimate physics pun that doubles as existential motivation! In physics, potential energy is stored energy that could do work but hasn't yet. On Earth, that potential is literally converted to weight due to gravity (E = mgh). So technically, you're not heavy—you're just experiencing the Earth's gravitational field converting your potential into a downward force! Next time someone comments on your weight, just tell them you're simply too full of potential for this planet to handle. Maybe we should all move to the Moon where our potential would be about 1/6 as "heavy"!

Signed up for Advanced Thermodynamics, got recursion instead. That moment when you realize your engineering professor has the logical structure of a cat discovering object permanence. First rule of bladeless fans: the blades are always inside another layer of abstraction. Just like how my understanding of this course is inside my professor's imagination.

This perfectly captures the risk assessment methodology of every scientist who's ever said "hold my beaker." The transition from acknowledging danger to dismissing safety concerns to threatening to ignite a flamethrower is essentially the scientific method in its purest form. Just like how we casually handle hydrofluoric acid after the first-year grad student gives us a five-second safety briefing. The beautiful physics of buoyancy and thermodynamics that make hot air balloons work is completely overshadowed by the primal joy of floating in a wicker basket powered by fire. This is research funding meetings in a nutshell.

The brain that refuses to sleep is the same brain that ponders fundamental physics at 3 AM. Photons, the particles of light, indeed have no rest mass—that's why they can travel at the universal speed limit of 299,792,458 m/s. They're essentially the universe's way of saying "I travel light because I literally am light." This is the kind of thought that keeps physicists awake and everyone else wishing their brain came with an off switch.

The Standard Model of Elementary Particles, but make it adorable and slightly deranged! Someone took physics' most fundamental framework and decided "you know what quarks need? Googly eyes and cute names." I particularly enjoy how the "top" quark looks suspiciously mischievous while "bottom" appears traumatized by its existence. And let's not ignore "weirdo" replacing the strange quark - finally, a particle named by someone who skipped the pretentious nomenclature meeting. This is what happens when you let physicists work unsupervised for too long. Next thing you know, they'll be giving the Higgs boson a tiny top hat and monocle.

The eternal battle of theoretical physics in one image! Time-independent perturbation theory is the hot date you bring home to your parents—simple, well-behaved, and solvable before dinner. Meanwhile, time-dependent perturbation theory lurks in the shadows like that homework problem that made you question your life choices. For the uninitiated: perturbation theory is how physicists solve problems they can't actually solve. Time-independent versions let you calculate stuff without worrying about that pesky fourth dimension. Add time dependence? Suddenly you're drowning in partial differential equations while questioning why you didn't just become an accountant. The face transformation is every grad student halfway through their quantum mechanics final. Pure emotional damage.