The Academic Existential Crisis Diagram

The perfect visual representation of matter states using... penguins? Brilliant! This meme cleverly maps the molecular arrangement of gas, liquid, and solid states to penguin colony behavior. In the gas phase, penguins are widely dispersed with minimal interaction (high entropy, maximum waddling freedom). The liquid phase shows penguins with moderate proximity but still mobile (think of them as able to slide past each other). The solid phase depicts tightly packed penguins in a rigid, ordered structure (minimal entropy, maximum huddle efficiency). It's thermodynamics and collective behavior in one delightfully cold package! This is basically what happens when physicists go to Antarctica and get bored.

This flowchart is what happens when career counselors have a mental breakdown. Engineering? Only if you're "good with things." Chemistry? Congratulations on your future as a "fussy pedant." And let's not forget Computer Science, perfect for those who prefer "slow, indirect evil" over the more efficient varieties. The beautiful part is how it nails the existential crisis of every STEM student. "Why do you want to major in a STEM field?" Options include "curiosity" (adorable), "to save the planet" (delusional), or my personal favorite, the dawning realization that STEM was supposed to involve actual plants for Biology majors. After 30 years of teaching, I can confirm this is approximately 87% accurate. The missing 13% is the path where you choose your major based on which department has the least uncomfortable chairs in the lecture hall.

Physics and chemistry textbooks have the shelf life of milk left in a hot car, but math books? Those ancient tomes could survive nuclear winter. While physicists dismiss anything pre-Newton as medieval nonsense and chemists scoff at texts predating electron discovery, mathematicians are over here using theorems from 300 BCE like they were published yesterday. Pythagoras would walk into a modern classroom and be like, "Yep, that's my triangle thing. Still works!" Math isn't less evolved—it's just built different. It's the cockroach of academic disciplines: unchanging, indestructible, and guaranteed to outlive us all.

The eternal cosmological chicken-and-egg paradox that keeps physicists up at night. If physical laws govern how the universe operates, but those laws couldn't exist without a universe to operate in... we've got ourselves a causality loop that would make Einstein reach for the aspirin. Some theorize laws of physics transcend our universe, existing in some abstract platonic realm. Others suggest they emerged with spacetime itself during the Big Bang. Either way, it's the kind of philosophical conundrum that turns department meetings into existential crises. Next week: "Which requires more energy—explaining this paradox or just accepting we don't know?"

Four centuries of physics development condensed into two arrows. Newton took us from discrete sums (Σ) to continuous integration (∫), essentially saying "let's smooth things out." Then Planck shows up and reverses the whole operation with quantum mechanics, saying "actually, everything's discrete packets again." The entire universe oscillating between chunky and smooth like some cosmic peanut butter experiment. Physicists spent 200 years perfecting calculus only for nature to whisper "psych!"

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!