contrived
Explanation
This comic shows a professor standing at a chalkboard with physics diagrams (vectors, trajectories, and equations), declaring: "Now, let's use this utterly contrived situation that will never occur in order to build intuition about the real world."
The caption at the bottom reads: "It turns out there is a deep connection between physics and moral philosophy."
The joke draws a parallel between two academic disciplines that both rely heavily on simplified, unrealistic scenarios to derive general principles. In physics, students constantly encounter idealized problems -- frictionless planes, spherical cows, massless ropes -- that strip away real-world complexity to isolate fundamental principles. In moral philosophy, thought experiments like the trolley problem, the experience machine, or the violinist scenario similarly present wildly contrived situations that would never actually occur, yet are used to build moral intuition.
The humor is in the professor's frank admission that the situation is "utterly contrived" and "will never occur," which is exactly the critique often leveled at both physics problem sets and philosophical thought experiments. By pointing out this shared methodology, the comic suggests that the two fields, despite seeming very different, are united by their love of absurdly unrealistic scenarios used in pursuit of deeper truths.