2011-06-10
Explanation
This comic pokes fun at the rivalry between scientific disciplines. In the first panel, a woman dismissively tells someone: "Pff! A chemist? Go back to your little beakers and tubes, sweetie. This is a physics conference." This establishes the snobbish hierarchy in which physicists look down on chemists. In a flashback panel labeled "Earlier...", the woman (a physicist) and a man are chatting at the conference. She asks what he studies. He answers "One atom. How about you?" She replies "Two."
The punchline reveals the absurd basis for the disciplinary snobbery. In modern physics, studying the behavior of individual atoms is considered fundamental physics, while studying two or more atoms interacting starts to veer into chemistry. By this logic, the woman is actually closer to being a chemist than the man is, since she studies two atoms (which could constitute a molecule or chemical bond). The humor lies in exposing how arbitrary and petty the physics-versus-chemistry hierarchy is when the difference between the disciplines comes down to one versus two atoms.
The votey panel escalates the joke further: the man says "Sometimes three," and the woman recoils with "Eww! A biologist?!" This extends the hierarchy to biology, implying that the more atoms you study, the further down the prestige ladder you fall -- with biology (the study of enormously complex multi-atom systems) being treated as the most contemptible discipline of all.