2012-08-09
Explanation
This comic, titled "How Discovery Happens," satirizes the unpredictable and unglamorous nature of scientific breakthroughs. In the first panel, an eager young scientist with a pencil declares, "Okay! Now to think up a theory of everything" -- starting with the grandest possible ambition in physics. A time skip reads "10 years later..." and the same scientist, now older and dejected, thinks, "Dammit! Nothing! This sucks!" -- showing that a decade of focused work on the big question produced nothing.
Then a different person, casually sitting in a chair and looking at his foot, idly wonders, "Huh... I wonder why my toes are that far apart." Another time skip reads "2 years later..." and this person is now in a suit, presenting to an audience: "And that'''s how you remote control the Higgs field" -- showing a diagram related to the Higgs boson. The joke is that the monumental scientific discovery came not from deliberate, focused effort on the big question, but from a random, trivial observation about toe spacing.
The comic captures a real truth about scientific discovery: many breakthroughs come from unexpected directions, idle curiosity, and serendipity rather than from head-on attacks at the biggest problems. The contrast between the ambitious but fruitless decade of work and the casual two-year path from toe-gazing to controlling the Higgs field is both funny and insightful.
The votey panel adds another factor to how discovery happens: "Also... Cocaine" -- a nod to the historical role that stimulants and other substances have played in the lives of some notable scientists and thinkers, adding a darkly humorous footnote to the process of discovery.