2012-03-21
Explanation
This comic imagines physicists as pets, following the life cycle of a "pet physicist" in the style of a veterinary visit. A couple brings their physicist to the doctor, explaining that "something'''s wrong -- it keeps babbling about linguistics and neurology and climate science." The doctor diagnoses the problem by noting the physicist is old, and explains that "the physicist has a natural life cycle": juvenile physicists mostly roll around in books, mature ones are productive and fun, but as they age, they reach the "telling other fields they'''re wrong about everything" phase.
The doctor gravely recommends putting the physicist down, as there'''s nothing that can be done. The couple is devastated. That evening, the husband goes to spend a few last moments with his pet physicist, who is spouting characteristic old-physicist nonsense: "Climate models aren'''t reductionist enough! We can recreate the first language using statistics." The husband tearfully says "I know, buddy... I know..." while the physicist, oblivious, continues its misguided pronouncements.
The joke satirizes a real phenomenon in academia where some prominent physicists, as they age, begin making confident pronouncements about fields far outside their expertise -- linguistics, biology, climate science, neuroscience -- often dismissing the work of actual domain experts. This tendency has been widely noted and sometimes called "physicist'''s disease" or Nobel disease. The comic'''s framing of this as a terminal veterinary condition is both affectionate and biting. The votey panel shows the physicist howling like a dog in the night: "Awoooo-ooooncology is doing it wrong!" -- perfectly capturing the image of the aging physicist baying unsolicited critiques at the moon.