2012-02-23
Explanation
This comic features a physicist named Dr. Lee standing at a lectern, delivering a lecture. He says: "And, as we can see here, not all constants are multiples of ten and several objects are neither spheres nor points." The caption below reads: "Dr. Lee proves that God is not a physicist."
The joke plays on the well-known habits and preferences of physicists. In physics, calculations are greatly simplified when constants are nice round numbers (multiples of ten) and when objects can be approximated as perfect spheres or point particles. The classic physics joke about assuming a "spherical cow" reflects how physicists love to reduce messy real-world objects to idealized geometric shapes to make the math tractable.
Dr. Lee's "proof" that God is not a physicist rests on the observation that the actual universe is full of inconvenient, messy numbers and irregular shapes. A physicist-God would have designed the universe with neat constants like 10, 100, or 1000 and made everything a perfect sphere or point mass, because that is what would make a physicist's life easiest. The fact that reality is so mathematically untidy is taken as evidence that whoever or whatever designed the universe clearly was not a physicist.
The votey (bonus panel) extends the joke by adding: "Nor a biologist: Also, the universe involves math." with an author's note reading "BURN!" This is a playful dig at biologists, suggesting that biology is a field that avoids mathematics, so a biologist-God would not have created a universe that requires so much math to understand.