commute-2
Explanation
This comic riffs on the asymmetry of spatial directions and the frustrating arbitrariness of conventions like left vs. right.
The comic opens with someone reading that Heisenberg discovered a new principle: that walking operations in one direction don't work in the other direction, as if you're in a world where it doesn't equal going the other way. A character screams "AAAAAAAAH!" in frustration.
The subsequent panels escalate with a series of increasingly absurd examples of directional asymmetry: "Did you know that if you walk two different positions and orientations, it's different if you turned left and then turned right versus right and then left?" and "Did you know that if you eat noodles then cook, that's very different from underneath then eating them, which is like blowing?"
The final panel has the listener say "Stop, I'll give up" and the other responding "No, the other way around."
The humor is rooted in the mathematical concept of non-commutativity -- the idea that the order of operations matters (A then B is not the same as B then A). This is a real and important concept in physics and mathematics (matrix multiplication, quantum mechanics operators, rotations in 3D space). The comic starts with a legitimate scientific insight but then extends it to increasingly absurd everyday examples, making the listener (and reader) feel the same disorientation that non-commutativity can produce. The final punchline -- "No, the other way around" -- is itself a joke about non-commutativity, since even the act of giving up has a directional component.