When The New Undergrad Walks Into The Lab For The First Time

When life gets tough, regular folks talk about "jumping off buildings" while physics students just want to "experience weightlessness." Same suicidal ideation, just dressed up in fancy terminology! That brief moment between jumping and landing—when you're in free fall and gravity's acceleration cancels out your normal force—is technically weightlessness. It's the same principle astronauts experience in orbit, just with a much shorter duration and significantly worse Yelp reviews. Physics education: where even existential crises get reformulated as thought experiments about gravitational fields.

The eternal battle between memorization and actual understanding. While your classmates are busy regurgitating facts for multiple choice glory, you're the weirdo insisting that 9.8 m/s² needs proper units or the answer is physically meaningless. Sure, they get the A with minimal effort, but you're the one who'll actually remember how gravity works in 10 years. Dimensional analysis might not win popularity contests, but it'll save your behind when your boss asks why the bridge collapsed. The universe doesn't grade on a curve—it demands dimensional consistency!

Finding common ground in confusion! Dynamics—that terrifying realm where Newton's laws meet calculus in a dark alley and beat up your brain. Even engineering students break into cold sweats when forces start moving. It's that subject where professors write equations, students nod knowingly, and absolutely nobody has any idea what's happening. The universal language of engineering students isn't math—it's the shared trauma of dynamics homework!

The professor hands over what looks like a simple assignment, but then BAM—it's the continuity equation for charge conservation: ∇·J = -∂ρ/∂t. That face in the middle panels says it all! This equation basically states that electric charge can't be created or destroyed (only moved around), but trying to solve problems with it feels like trying to explain quantum mechanics to your cat. The student's progression from confidence to existential crisis is the physics equivalent of ordering "just a light salad" and receiving a 17-course molecular gastronomy experiment. Every electrodynamics student has had this exact moment when Maxwell's equations stop being theoretical and start getting personal.

The desperate connection between pregnancy and horsepower is the kind of logic that keeps physics teachers up at night. Horsepower is a unit of power equal to 746 watts, not a literal count of horses inside an engine. That disappointed seal represents every educator who's watched their careful explanations of mechanical physics crumble under the weight of a student's "brilliant" insight. The wall of red string connections in the background really sells the manic energy of someone who thinks they've discovered a groundbreaking scientific principle while completely missing the fundamentals.

Engineering students living in their own dimension where casual conversation is replaced by Navier-Stokes equations. The meme brilliantly captures that moment when someone asks a fluid dynamics enthusiast "how's it going?" and their brain immediately floods with partial differential equations instead of normal human responses. The Navier-Stokes equations shown are the holy grail of fluid dynamics - describing how the velocity, pressure, density and viscosity of a moving fluid are related. They're notoriously complex (one of the Millennium Prize Problems offers $1 million for solving them!), yet to engineering students, they're just casual chitchat material. That final "yea" panel is engineering humor at its finest - as if these incomprehensible equations are just a normal way to respond to "how's it going?" The title "Who Up Stoking They Navier Rn?" perfectly parodies late-night social media posts with "who up?" but for people who stay up late solving fluid dynamics problems instead.