2012-08-25
Explanation
This comic satirizes human relationships by reframing them using the visual language of particle physics Feynman diagrams. A professor lectures to a class, explaining that "male and female particles interact, split apart, at which point it is possible the female particle will emit a baby, in a process called baby emission." The accompanying diagram on the board uses male and female symbols as particles, with arrows showing their interaction and a baby symbol being emitted -- mimicking the structure of a Feynman diagram used in quantum field theory.
The students ask increasingly physics-flavored questions about this "relationship physics." One asks whether baby emission violates "conservation of money," to which the professor explains money is carried by the initial particles and lost during baby emission. Another asks what happens when two left-side particles are of the same type (a reference to same-sex relationships), and the professor notes that the particles interact and money remains conserved, but no baby emission has been observed. Then a student reveals she is a "biblical literalist," and the professor responds: "I'''m sorry, but in this class we do not deal with spontaneous baby emission" -- a physics-styled rejection of the virgin birth concept.
The joke works on multiple levels: it parodies how physicists model everything with diagrams and conservation laws, while also commenting on real social phenomena (the cost of children, same-sex relationships, and religious beliefs about conception) through the absurd lens of particle physics terminology. The parallel between "spontaneous emission" in physics and "immaculate conception" in theology is particularly clever.
In the votey, the biblical literalist student doubles down, saying she prefers the term "immaculate emission" -- a perfect portmanteau combining "immaculate conception" with the comic'''s physics jargon of "baby emission," tying both threads of the joke together.