analogies
Explanation
The Joke
A physics professor announces he has come up with a clever analogy for electric current using armadillos. His students protest that the existing concept of electric current is already not hard to understand. Undeterred, the professor launches into an increasingly elaborate and convoluted analogy: the armadillos are afraid (representing voltage as fear), their ears represent spin states, the armadillo does not exist in a single point but in a probability space embodied in its rings, and so on. As the analogy spirals further into absurdity, a student begs for mercy. Finally, when a student protests that the professor is no longer even talking about armadillos but rather about Richard Feynman, the professor responds that Feynman "is charging the armadillos -- he is the electric field."
The Humor
The comic satirizes the tendency of some educators to create analogies that are far more confusing than the concepts they are meant to explain. The professor clearly enjoys the analogy more than his students do, and each new element makes the analogy less useful rather than more. The joke escalates as the analogy absorbs increasingly advanced physics concepts (spin states, probability space, quantum mechanics) that are far harder to understand than simple electric current. The students' mounting distress -- culminating in cries of "show mercy" -- highlights how the analogy has become a vehicle for the professor's own intellectual self-indulgence rather than a teaching tool. The final panel, where Feynman himself becomes part of the analogy as the electric field, is the ultimate absurdity.
References
- Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist famous for his ability to explain complex physics concepts in accessible ways -- making it ironic that he is being drafted into this incomprehensible analogy.
- The physics concepts referenced (voltage, spin states, probability space) are real quantum mechanics and electromagnetism concepts, each one more advanced than the simple concept of electric current the analogy was supposed to clarify.