2012-04-22
Explanation
This comic is a two-panel joke about the privilege of naming a scientific discovery. The top caption reads "The best part of discovering a grand unified theory..." and shows a female physicist at a podium announcing that all interaction can be explained by four-dimensional curled strings. This is a clear reference to string theory, one of the leading candidates for a "theory of everything" in physics.
The second panel delivers the punchline with the caption "was permanently naming it." The same physicist announces the name for these theoretical objects: "Hyperpubes." The humor comes from the fact that the discoverer of a grand unified theory would have the once-in-history opportunity to name the most fundamental building blocks of reality, and she uses that power to give them a deliberately juvenile, anatomically suggestive name. The word plays on real physics terminology like "hypercubes" while smuggling in crude humor. It also riffs on real string theory jargon which already sounds somewhat absurd to laypeople.
The votey panel extends the joke further: "When fermions are accounted for, it'''s called Superpube Theory." This is a parody of how string theory becomes "superstring theory" when it incorporates supersymmetry to account for fermions (matter particles). The comic imagines an entire branch of physics saddled with embarrassing nomenclature because one physicist seized her naming rights.