Physics Hates This One Simple Trick

Hawking's brilliant time travel experiment was both elegant and cheeky. He threw a party with all the fancy trimmings but only advertised it after it happened. The genius move? If backward time travel were possible, time travelers would've shown up. Nobody did. The "Fight Club" reference at the bottom just seals the deal - apparently the unwritten rule of the time travelers' handbook is to avoid Hawking's trap party. Solid scientific method with champagne and canapés? That's how theoretical physics should always work!

Nothing triggers physics students quite like unit inconsistency! 😾 One minute you're learning that distance is the total path traveled while displacement is the straight-line difference between start and finish points... then BAM! The textbook throws miles at you when you've been working in meters the whole time. That grumpy cat face is every STEM student silently screaming "PICK A SYSTEM AND STICK WITH IT!" The metric system didn't conquer the scientific world just to have textbooks playing both sides!

The face of pure mathematical betrayal! Engineering students committing the cardinal sin of approximating tan(θ) ≈ θ when angles are tiny. Pure mathematicians would rather die than accept this heresy, but engineers are too busy building bridges to care about those extra decimal places. The small angle approximation works because as angles approach zero, the tangent function converges to the angle itself—making calculations way easier. Next thing you know, they'll be saying π = 3 and calling it "close enough for government work."

The beauty of this is there is no chemical formula for ideal gas because it doesn't actually exist! It's a theoretical construct we torture undergrads with—a fictional gas whose particles have zero volume and zero interaction forces. Just like my dating prospects after tenure review. Chemistry students everywhere silently nodding while having flashbacks to PV=nRT equations. The ideal gas is basically the unicorn of chemistry: perfectly behaved, mathematically convenient, and completely imaginary. Yet we base entire exam questions on it!

The duality of academic suffering on full display! Physics students are contemplating getting absolutely hammered before their electromagnetic finals (a completely reasonable coping mechanism), while math students are casually pondering abstract field axioms and the philosophical underpinnings of arithmetic operations. Physics majors: "Will alcohol help me forget Maxwell's equations?" Math majors: "But what really is multiplication when you think about it?" And yet both posts got nearly identical engagement numbers. Misery loves company, regardless of whether you're drowning in vector calculus or abstract algebra. The universal language of academia isn't math—it's suffering.

The scientific courtship ritual in its natural habitat! Two specimens finding each other through their shared love of absurd hypothetical scenarios. Nothing bonds potential mates like discussing what would happen if 8 billion humans jumped at once (spoiler: practically nothing to the Earth, but absolute chaos for humanity's personal space boundaries). Randall Munroe's "What If?" book has created more nerdy relationships than any dating app ever could. The real experiment would be measuring how many first dates have included the phrase "but theoretically speaking..."