Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The comic is titled "How to get a physicist to date you" and shows a woman telling a man: "I want you. By symmetry, we can predict that you want me." The physicist responds with evident temptation: "That would simplify things..."

The joke plays on the concept of symmetry in physics, which is one of the most powerful and fundamental tools in the discipline. In physics, symmetry arguments allow you to make profound predictions -- for example, Noether's theorem shows that every symmetry in nature corresponds to a conservation law. Physicists are trained to find symmetry arguments deeply compelling and elegant. The woman exploits this by framing her romantic proposition as a symmetry argument: if she wants him, then by symmetry, he must want her too. Of course, this is a completely invalid application of symmetry (human attraction is not a symmetric relation), but the physicist finds the reasoning so aesthetically appealing that he's genuinely tempted to accept it. The humor comes from the idea that a physicist's devotion to elegant mathematical reasoning could override their actual romantic feelings.