soup
Explanation
This comic reimagines cosmology from the perspective of bacteria living in a bowl of soup. A bacterium asks the fundamental cosmological question: "Yes, but WHY did the soup start at such low entropy?" — a direct reference to one of the deepest unsolved problems in physics: why did the universe begin in an extraordinarily low-entropy state? This is known as the "Past Hypothesis" or the problem of the arrow of time.
The caption reads: "Sadly, bacterial cosmologists never survive long enough to understand their universe." The scene shows a row of soup bowls on what appears to be a kitchen counter — the bacteria's "universe" is just a bowl of soup in a much larger world they can never perceive.
The joke works on multiple levels. First, it's a scale gag: bacteria pondering their soup-universe mirrors humans pondering our cosmos, suggesting that our own cosmological questions might look equally parochial from a sufficiently large perspective. Second, the specific reference to low entropy is well-chosen — entropy in a thermodynamic sense is directly relevant to soup (which starts hot and ordered, then cools and decays), making the bacteria's question both scientifically literate and situationally appropriate. Third, the poignant caption adds a layer of melancholy: the bacteria die before understanding their universe, just as humans may go extinct or the universe may become uninhabitable before we answer our own deepest cosmological questions. The comic invites a humbling thought: we might be the bacterial cosmologists of a much larger system we'll never comprehend.