Susskind Physicists Tier List 2025

RADIOACTIVE ROMANCE at its finest! Marie Curie's Christmas wishlist consisted of exactly ONE element – uranium (U) – because nothing says "holiday cheer" like discovering new radioactive elements in your basement lab! The woman literally GLOWED with excitement about her research (possibly literally, given all that radiation exposure). While other Victorian ladies wanted jewelry or fancy hats, Marie was out here revolutionizing physics and chemistry simultaneously. Talk about relationship goals – her husband Pierre was totally cool with her asking Santa for deadly substances. The ultimate power couple didn't need mistletoe when they had shared Nobel Prizes!

The eternal battle between physicists and mathematicians in one perfect exchange! Physicists are all about practical approximations—"close enough" is practically their motto. Meanwhile, mathematicians are sitting there hyperventilating if you don't rigorously prove every microscopic step. When a physicist says "I think you're over-thinking it," what they really mean is "Stop making this harder than it needs to be—just round π to 3 and call it a day!" The mathematician's response? "I think you're under-thinking it"—translation: "Your shameful approximations make baby Euler cry." This is basically every interdepartmental meeting in STEM history compressed into two lines. Pure gold.

That moment when you realize you've been carrying the wrong sign through 17 steps of your differential equation... Now you need to redo everything . Your 10-minute solution just became a 3-hour odyssey because you wrote "+c" instead of "-c" on page one. The academic equivalent of an astronaut realizing a tiny calculation error will send them hurling around the sun for an extra half-century. The universe runs on precision, and your brain apparently runs on caffeine and wishful thinking.

The pie chart perfectly represents quantum superposition - the cat exists in both states simultaneously until observed. Notice how the "Yes" and "No" slices add up to 100%, yet remain distinct. Just like how my relationships with lab equipment survive - in a perpetual state of "working" and "definitely not working" until I need to use it for an important experiment.

The ultimate mashup of quantum physics and moral philosophy! This meme brilliantly combines the famous double-slit experiment and Schrödinger's cat with the trolley problem in ethics. It's basically saying: "Here's a quantum version of the trolley problem where your measurement collapses the wave function and determines who lives or dies—oh, and by the way, you're philosophically ill-equipped to handle this because you're stuck in ancient virtue ethics." The quantum mechanics here is deliciously complex—wave-particle duality, entanglement, and measurement problems all wrapped into one ethical nightmare. In quantum mechanics, particles exist in superpositions until measured, at which point they "collapse" into definite states. Here, your measurement literally determines life and death across multiple possible universes! The final punchline about being a virtue ethicist who missed everything after Aristotle is the chef's kiss—imagine trying to apply Aristotelian ethics to quantum mechanics when you've missed 2,300 years of philosophical and scientific development. Talk about being underprepared for your physics final!

The guy's not wrong. The Zeroth Law basically says if A = B and B = C, then A = C. It's like discovering your coffee mug is the same temperature as your desk, and your desk is the same temperature as your keyboard, so—shocking revelation—your coffee mug is the same temperature as your keyboard. Physicists really spent centuries figuring that out and then had to awkwardly insert it as the "Zeroth" law because they'd already numbered the others. Classic scientific numbering crisis. Next they'll tell us water is wet.