2012-11-03
Explanation
This comic jokes about the frustrating gap between introductory physics and more advanced physics courses. In the first panel, an older professor tells a student heading off to college, "Good luck in college, kiddo. You know, I actually had more trouble in basic physics than most of the later stuff." The student replies, "Huh. I wonder why?"
The second panel, labeled "Soon...", reveals the answer. A physics professor is lecturing with a wall of absurd simplifying assumptions: "Now, this all makes sense if we assume the spring is a ball on a pendulum with its mass at a point at its center suspended in mid-air but there's no air and no gravity and the pendulum spring has no mass and no friction. I believe the other unstated assumptions are obvious." The joke is that introductory physics courses strip problems down to such unrealistic idealizations that the subject becomes paradoxically harder to understand, because the simplified models bear so little resemblance to actual physical experience that students cannot build intuition from them.
The votey panel adds to this with the student saying: "Also, pi = 3, g = 10, and anything we don't like = 0." This is a well-known joke among physics and engineering students about the aggressive rounding and simplification that occurs in introductory courses -- pi is approximated as 3, gravitational acceleration is rounded from 9.81 to 10, and any inconvenient terms in equations are simply set to zero and ignored.