Stand Ready For My Arrival, Freshman

Physics and chemistry professors smugly dismiss old textbooks, but the math professor is like "2+2=4 since Babylonian times, deal with it." Euclid's Elements from 300 BCE is still taught today while Newton's physics got wrecked by Einstein and chemistry textbooks become doorstops after each new particle discovery. The mathematical flex is real—proving once again that numbers are the ultimate flex in the academic hierarchy. Pythagoras would be so proud his theorem hasn't needed a software update in 2500 years.

The eternal struggle of engineering students everywhere! When the textbook says "k = 1.4 W/mK" your brain immediately goes "Watts per milliKelvin" instead of the correct "Watts per meter-Kelvin." That grimacing Winnie the Pooh face is the universal expression of realizing you've been calculating thermal conductivity wrong for the past hour. Nothing says "I'm about to fail this thermodynamics exam" quite like mixing up your units and getting answers that are 1000x off. The pain is thermal and very, very real.

The pandemic really humbled the physics community! While biologists and chemists were front and center battling COVID-19, developing vaccines and treatments, physicists were suddenly... not the heroes of the scientific narrative. For decades, physicists dominated scientific discourse with their grand unified theories and particle accelerators, often looking down on "softer" sciences. Then COVID hit, and suddenly those biochemistry classes everyone skipped became pretty darn important. Nothing like a global pandemic to make you realize that understanding proteins might be slightly more urgent than string theory. The physicists' collective "perhaps I treated you too harshly" is basically science's version of "sorry I was a jerk in high school, you're actually cool now."

The mathematical naivety is just... *exhales cigarette smoke*... painful. Engineering students thinking they're escaping math is like believing you can avoid water by jumping into the ocean. Differential equations, vector calculus, and numerical methods will find you. They always do. The difference? Physicists derive the equations, engineers just solve them... repeatedly... with boundary conditions from hell. Sweet summer children.

That baseball sitting at the bottom of a curved blue surface is experiencing what physicists call a gravity well. Just like how massive objects bend spacetime, that blue fabric is bending under the ball's weight, creating a potential energy minimum. Exactly what Thanos is referencing—using one manifestation of gravity to explain another. Recursive physics humor at its finest. Next week's experiment: replace the baseball with a grad student's will to continue their dissertation.

Physicists love defining things with absolute certainty until someone asks them to actually explain what those things are . We can write equations for charge all day, but ask us to explain its fundamental nature and suddenly we're all awkward silence and angry eyebrows. It's like asking a mathematician what numbers really are—prepare for existential crisis in 3...2...1...