What It Feels To Work With Photonic Qubits And Squeezed Coherent States

That moment when you correctly explain gravity in a Reddit comment and suddenly you're floating above Newton and Galileo with cosmic wings. Sure, I read half a physics textbook once and watched a YouTube video about quantum mechanics. Basically the same as revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. The undergraduate physics major's final form isn't even their final form.

Welcome to the magical realm of "ideal conditions" where bears bounce like rubber balls! In intro physics, we simplify problems by pretending friction and air resistance don't exist—creating a fantasy world where objects fly in perfect parabolas and bears apparently gain superhero jumping abilities! That little critter just yeeted itself across a canyon in perfect mathematical arcs that would make Newton both proud and terrified. It's the physics equivalent of saying "let's pretend calories don't count on weekends" except instead of guilt, you get impossible trajectories! Reality is just a pesky variable we can eliminate with the stroke of a pencil!

Just your typical math problem where a student bikes 200km to school at 90km/h while hitting pedestrians every 10 minutes. Because that's how we all got to school - leaving at 3AM and calculating intercept trajectories with siblings. The real lesson here isn't kinematics, it's that math teachers clearly never sleep and have no concept of reasonable human behavior. Next problem: "If Johnny has 47 watermelons and gives away 12, why does he have so many watermelons in the first place?"

When a physicist finally peeks inside Schrödinger's famous thought experiment only to find a regular cat staring back, not the quantum superposition they were hoping for! The joke plays on the famous quantum mechanics thought experiment where a cat in a box is theoretically both alive and dead simultaneously until observed. Finding a normal cat ruins the whole quantum party – like expecting to witness the fabric of reality unraveling and instead getting a furball wondering where its dinner is. The disappointed cat face perfectly captures that moment when reality fails to live up to theoretical physics.

The scientific community's equivalent of fighting words: ranking sci-fi films by physics accuracy. The bottom panel shows Arthur's clenched fist—the universal symbol for "I respectfully disagree with your assessment of black hole depictions in cinema." Nothing triggers physicists more than seeing Interstellar (with its Kip Thorne-consulted black hole) ranked below Contact . That's like saying you prefer your equations without constants of integration. Unforgivable.

The bell curve of physics understanding strikes again! At the low end, folks blissfully admit they have no clue what gravity is. At the high end, frustrated PhDs have mental breakdowns after dedicating their lives to questions that remain stubbornly unanswered. Meanwhile, in the comfortable middle, people confidently recite "gravity is spacetime curvature" without understanding a single tensor equation behind it. This is basically the scientific version of the Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids. The more you learn about fundamental physics, the more you realize we're all just sophisticated apes throwing math at mysteries and hoping something sticks. Those quantum fruit loops and nth dimensional strings aren't looking so silly now, are they?