Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic presents a recursive simulation hypothesis joke. In three successive panels, alien-like beings at increasingly higher levels of reality complain that "the universe's physics is too complicated" and decide to simplify the rules for their simulation. Each layer of simulators is itself a simulation created by the layer above, with each round of simplification producing stranger physics.

The punchline comes in the final panel, where two human physicists discuss the seemingly bizarre nature of our universe -- "So, the universe is made entirely of tiny wobbly strings?" "Weird, right?" This is a reference to string theory, one of the most counterintuitive frameworks in modern theoretical physics. The comic suggests that the reason our universe's fundamental physics seems so strange and arbitrary is that it is the end product of multiple layers of lazy simulation designers each cutting corners and simplifying the rules, resulting in an elegant but deeply weird set of physical laws. It is a humorous take on the simulation argument popularized by philosopher Nick Bostrom.