R/Physics On Most Days

Oganesson (element 118) is having an existential crisis, and honestly, who can blame it? This superheavy element only exists for less than a millisecond before radioactively decaying. Scientists literally create it in a lab, and before the poor thing can even figure out its place in the periodic table—poof, it's gone! It's basically the mayfly of chemistry, except instead of living for 24 hours, it gets about 0.0000001 seconds to contemplate its noble gas classification. Imagine being so unstable that researchers have only made about 5 atoms of you... EVER. No wonder it's confused about its identity—it barely has time to introduce itself to the neighboring elements before disintegrating!

The infamous Schrödinger's cat experiment meets surrealist art! The meme brilliantly mashes up quantum physics with René Magritte's famous painting "The Treachery of Images" (you know, the pipe with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" underneath). In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger proposed his famous thought experiment where a cat in a box with a radioactive trigger is simultaneously alive and dead until observed. Here we see the cat both transparent (dead) and solid (alive) with the radioactive material and trigger mechanism nearby. The French phrase "Ceci n'est pas une dead or alive" (This is not a dead or alive) is the perfect punchline - because quantum superposition means it's literally both states at once until measured. It's quantum physics making fun of itself!

The exact moment Georg Ohm realized his groundbreaking law: "Wait... so you're telling me that if I make it harder for electrons to flow, FEWER electrons flow?!" Revolutionary stuff in 1827! The wild hair perfectly captures that electricity-just-went-through-my-brain moment. Imagine spending months measuring current through different materials only to discover something so fundamentally obvious that you need to double-check your notes while your colleagues try not to snicker. That's how we got V=IR, folks - pure shocked-face science.

The ultimate horseshoe theory of physics understanding! This bell curve meme perfectly captures how both intellectual extremes—flat earthers and relativistic physicists—somehow arrive at the same conclusion ("the ground is accelerating up") while the normies in the middle stick with "gravity pulls us down." What makes this brilliant is that Einstein's General Relativity actually does describe gravity not as a force but as the curvature of spacetime. Standing on Earth is equivalent to accelerating upward in empty space—it's called the equivalence principle! So the 145 IQ physicist is technically correct for profound reasons, while the 55 IQ flat earther stumbles into the same verbal description through sheer cosmic coincidence. Meanwhile, the 100 IQ normies with their "gravity pulls down" are technically wrong but functionally correct enough for everyday life.

The ultimate scientific flex! This Venn diagram perfectly captures the academic food chain where physicists reign supreme. According to this diagram, physicists can mock engineers, get paid well, AND be better than chemists—the STEM field trifecta! Meanwhile, mathematicians are stuck just mocking engineers, engineers can't win Nobel Prizes, and chemists... well, they're apparently everyone's punching bag. The center suggests that the ultimate achievement in science is being better than chemists. Whoever made this was definitely a physicist with an axe to grind and a superiority complex the size of a supermassive black hole. The interdepartmental shade is strong with this one!

From your reference frame, technically everything IS revolving around you! Einstein's relativity lets you pick any reference frame you want - including one where you're stationary and the entire universe orbits YOU. Physics doesn't care about your ego, but it does give you a legitimate comeback when someone says "the world doesn't revolve around you." Sorry Karen, in my reference frame, it literally does! The laws of physics just handed narcissists their best argument ever.