"Knapsack?" That is a bindle, you Philistine!
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Thank you kind lexical hero.
Is it just me or is the whole comic image too blurry to ready any of the text?
EDIR: Oh, there's a HD button
I almost kinda dislike the messaging on this one because it implies authoritarianism is the key to discovery. Scientists are implied to be passive and unindustrious when left alone, so the government (FBI-type characters) declare a truth they want proven, force development of it through the threat of violence, and it eventually yields an answer they're happy with.
I'm reminded of the film The Death of Stalin and it's depiction of the USSR's treatment of bourgeois intellectuals like doctors.
My interpretation was that pink lady shouted out some crap formula FBI guy does not understand anyway so they would be left alone again.
Last panel half contradicts it, half just leans harder into the absurdity of it all. I wouldn't expect physicists to care much about Rubik's Cubes, I think even the cliché fits mathematicians much better.
Basically, my spontaneous takeaway was "government and media are so science-illiterate that nobody understands anyone anymore".
I interpreted the opposite; once they were freed from day to day bullshit, they were able to reach new discoveries the way 20th century hiking scientists
That's how I read the intent of the author, at least. Getting scientists out of their isolated bubbles and allowing them to actually experience the world drives innovation.
That, or the one physicist who figured it out was so traumatized by merely being outside that she figured it out as quickly as possible to make it all stop, haha.
I guess that's the joke - this is so stupid and obviously won't work, but that perspective is subverted when it turns out to actually work, causing humour.
I quite like it.
Fair, I guess I'm just letting the world get to me!
Read more SMBC, it might help! Or give you more anxiety. But at least you'll be smiling.
that's a great film. it's on my annual watch list, will update the date i watch it on when appropriate.
I take umbrage with the idea that gravity is necessarily quantisable- for all we know, it can’t be quantised.
Sounds like someone needs to go for a walk
ugg fiiine you can try to gravitize quantum mechanics, if you really must
Nah, quantum fields all rest on another dimensional layer. The quantum foam experiences a weak cohesion force that doesnt drop off with distance. This results in clustering of the foam, resulting in clustering of the deeper field. This is emergent on the macroscopic scale as the folding of space time, which is really just the tendancy of energy to condense on the quantum scale.
Or maybe partical interactions being dependant on locality results in a sort of local energy spike as the two particles get closer. This results in time dilation between the two particles, altering the expected rate at which their interactions would occur, effectively setting a hard limit on how close two particles can get without fusing. This time dilation could also be responsible for the emergent property of gravity. Kinda like how doubling the passage of time effectively doubles the measured heat in a volume, given that heat is a measure of particle interactions per second. Twice the seconds, twice the interactions. If time gets fucky when two particals get close enough to interact, that could result in an illusionary force that emerges macroscopically as gravity.
This is all me fucking around but i think theres maybe a nugget of legit speculation in there
I understood some of these words
My theory runs as follows:
Take two partcles, and measure the energy found in both if them and the space between them. It is my speculation that as they get closer, the energy in the space between them raises. It follows that with higher energy in a smaller area, the curvatureof spacetime would be warped, explaining the differance in expected values between quantum and relativity.
Basically im saying an oversight caused a math error.
I am not a quantum physicist and i only study it as a hobby, this is almost definitely not the actual solution
But energy is quantized. By your explanation, distance should also be quantized as a consequence.
Or distance might not be actually quantized, just that we can't place things in between like the pieces on a chess set.
Is distance not quantized? It was my understanding that the planc length was the "grid size" of the universal array, so to speak.
That being said, gravity as we detect it is not confirmed to be quantized, which is where the confusion comes in. That implies that there is a fundamental factor that is non quantized, possibly with other factors that may be quantized. What I'm getting at here is that while energy is definitely quantized, gravity may be a product of energy/distance, with distance being non quantized, resulting in non quantized gravity.
yeah, "can", "the", "and", this makes sense
Is gravity originates from an interaction of mass and distance, and both are quantized, doesn't it necessarily follow that gravity is also quantized?
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist.
We actually don’t know if distance is quantised- while distances smaller than the Planck length don’t make any sense with our current understanding of physics, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the quantum of distance.
No actually the blue dream bunny told me its hops are quantized, ergo distance must be quantized.
Cosmic Owl dreams come real, Blue Dream Bunny dreams are lies, this is basic science!
Only cuz Betty made that happen.
they were referring to beer hops not jump hops.
That's quiter talk!