I Can Calculate The Motion Of Heavenly Bodies, But Not The Madness Of People

The perfect mathematical representation of why I'm still single. My dating life follows a predictable cycle with the deterministic precision of a well-defined algorithm. The moment I mention my research on non-commutative algebraic geometry, I can literally calculate the escape velocity of my date to the nearest millisecond. My colleagues suggested I try not mentioning math until the third date, but that would require getting to a third date, which remains a theoretical construct.

The harsh reality of physics education summed up in one brutal image. Two doors: one for "understanding how nature works on a fundamental level" (completely empty) and another for "employment and money" (mobbed by desperate graduates). Nobody wants to unlock the secrets of the universe when they're surviving on ramen and grant rejections. The purest pursuit of knowledge apparently doesn't pay the bills! Meanwhile, the corporate world is like "Can you make this app load 0.2 seconds faster?" and throws money at you. The irony? Those fundamental physics discoveries eventually become the next generation's cash cows—just not for the people who discovered them.

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.

Death can't stop the pursuit of academic clout! While normal people get "Beloved Father" on their tombstones, scientists are out here turning graves into digital CVs. Imagine being so committed to your h-index that you're still collecting citations from beyond the veil. "Here lies Dr. Smith, 1950-2023, 157 publications, 10,000+ citations, and still waiting for that one paper to get accepted by Nature." The ultimate academic flex isn't a Nobel Prize—it's making sure everyone at your funeral can scan your tombstone to see that one breakthrough paper from 2008 that revolutionized your field. Publish or perish? More like publish AND perish, but make sure your Google Scholar profile outlives you!

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has a long history of going to biologists, leaving actual chemists wondering if their field even exists anymore. The years listed in the title are when biologists snagged the chemistry prize, creating an existential crisis for pure chemists everywhere. It's like hosting a party and watching someone else get congratulated for your cooking. Chemists sit in their labs, surrounded by beakers of colorful liquids that apparently don't merit recognition, quietly muttering "Why are we still here? Just to suffer?" while biologists add another medal to their collection for basically doing chemistry-adjacent work.

What looks like gibberish to normal humans is just casual conversation for physicists. That equation? It's just "miles" in disguise. Physicists can't simply say "my friend lives 8 miles away" without converting it into a horrifying amalgamation of fundamental constants. Then they have the audacity to act like this is perfectly reasonable social behavior. Classic case of someone who's spent too much time in the lab and forgotten how to communicate with regular mortals.