Pick Your Fave Scientist

The 17th century equivalent of forgetting to hit "publish" on your blog post. Newton developed calculus and then just... kept it in a drawer somewhere while Leibniz swooped in with the same discovery and actually told people about it. Newton's shocked Pikachu face represents the universal reaction of anyone who's ever thought "I could have done that" after someone else gets famous for their idea. Publish or perish wasn't just a catchy academic slogan—it was a mathematical prophecy.

While Europe was busy dying from the bubonic plague in the 1660s, Newton was sent home from Cambridge and decided to casually revolutionize physics and optics. Nothing says "productive quarantine" like discovering that white light splits into a rainbow spectrum through a prism! The man literally invented calculus because he was bored. Meanwhile, I can barely finish a Netflix series during a sick day. This is peak scientist energy—ignoring a catastrophic pandemic to play with shiny trinkets and accidentally change the course of human understanding. Newton's priorities were crystal clear: plague

The natural habitat of a physics major, perfectly captured! From the sacred texts of Classical Electrodynamics (aka "Jackson" - the book that's broken more spirits than failed experiments) to the Python programming language (because why solve one equation when you can simulate a million?). The essentials continue with LaTeX for writing equations that look prettier than they actually are, scientific calculators with more buttons than you'll ever use, and Interstellar (because nothing says "I understand physics" like explaining why the movie got time dilation wrong at parties). And of course, the holy constants: pH 180° (the perfect excuse to say "technically, I'm just being precise" when correcting someone) and 3.14 (π, the number that haunts every circular problem). Not pictured: the crushing existential dread when realizing you've spent 3 hours deriving an equation that was already in the textbook appendix.

The meme hilariously pits pop culture against physics! Rihanna's famous "Shine bright like a diamond" lyric gets absolutely demolished by Einstein (allegedly) pointing out that diamonds don't actually shine—they reflect light through their crystalline structure. What makes this extra funny is that Einstein probably never said this, but it's exactly the kind of pedantic correction scientists love to make at parties. Technically, he's right though! Diamonds have a high refractive index (2.42) and perfect internal reflection geometry that scatters incoming light back to our eyes rather than generating their own luminescence. Next time someone tells you to shine like a diamond, hit them with some optical physics knowledge!

Euler's face appearing twice in the physics alignment chart is peak scientific comedy! The man's so brilliant he occupies multiple moral alignments simultaneously—a quantum superposition of ethics, if you will. This is basically D&D for nerds who already play D&D. Just waiting for Richard Feynman to claim the "Chaotic Good" spot while Newton definitely belongs in "Lawful Evil" (gravity was just his way of keeping us all down). The empty squares are practically begging for a physics department flame war about where to place Schrödinger—both dead and alive in the chart, naturally.

The classic "about to get smacked" meme perfectly captures the physics revolution of the early 20th century! Classical Electrodynamics is about to get absolutely demolished by Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics, which made Newtonian Mechanics look like a confused bystander. Poor Newton thought he had it all figured out with his cute little F=ma, only to discover the universe gets super weird at high speeds and tiny scales. It's like showing up to a knife fight with a spoon and suddenly realizing you're not even in the right century of physics! 😂