Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic presents a fake physics lecture about "information" traveling faster than the speed of light. A couple is told by the woman's mother that they should see other people, and the physicist explains this as a new force of nature: as the "pair annihilation" (breakup) commences, "information" is emitted from the relationship that instantly interacts with all particles (people) entangled with close relatives, best friends, and nosy cousins. When the "energy of gossip" was first detected, friends and relatives asked "Why have you broken up?" before the couple had even separated, proving the information traveled faster than light. The final panel shows two people marveling that a celebrity couple is "off again, on again" and one says "I think they're sending information beyond light speed! This is amazing!"

The Humor

The joke is a parody of physics lectures and the concept of quantum entanglement and faster-than-light information transfer. The comic humorously observes that when a couple breaks up, their friends and relatives somehow seem to find out instantaneously -- often before the couple has even fully separated. This real-world social phenomenon is dressed up in the language of physics, with terms like "pair annihilation" (a real particle physics term for when a particle meets its antiparticle), "entangled particles," and information traveling faster than light. The punchline at the bottom extends the joke to celebrity gossip, suggesting that tabloid coverage of on-again-off-again relationships is actually evidence of faster-than-light communication. The humor works because the physics jargon maps surprisingly well onto the social dynamics of breakups and gossip.

References

• Pair annihilation is a real physics process where a particle and its antiparticle collide and convert into energy.
• Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon where particles become correlated such that measuring one instantly affects the other, regardless of distance -- though in reality this cannot be used to send information faster than light.
• The comic riffs on the principle that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, a cornerstone of Einstein's special relativity.