Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic features a mad-scientist-type physicist who has invented the "Lorentz Fridge," a device that uses a particle accelerator to keep food fresh. He explains that he puts a plate of bacon into the accelerator, boosts it to near light speed, and then retrieves it two years later. Thanks to relativistic time dilation (a real consequence of Einstein's special relativity, described by the Lorentz factor), the bacon has only aged one minute from its own reference frame, so it is still warm and crispy.

The joke escalates when someone asks how much it cost. The scientist begins to say "Two tri..." (presumably "two trillion dollars") but then stops and suspiciously asks if the questioner is from the NSF (the National Science Foundation, a major U.S. government agency that funds scientific research). When the answer is yes, he panics and declares "You can't put a price on science!" -- a classic deflection used to avoid scrutiny over absurdly wasteful research spending. The comic satirizes both the impractical extremes of theoretical physics applied to everyday problems and the tension between scientists and their funding agencies over budget accountability.