thermo
Explanation
This comic presents a humorous origin story for thermodynamics. Three men — depicted in 19th-century attire to evoke the era when thermodynamics was actually developed — are having a conversation. One of them proposes: "Wait wait wait. What if we assume the universe is a garbage place that never does any work for free, and then examine how physics would operate?"
The caption reads: "The origin of thermodynamics."
The joke is a reductive but surprisingly accurate summary of the foundational assumptions of thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics essentially state that energy cannot be created or destroyed (first law), that entropy always increases and you can never get a perfect conversion of heat to work (second law), and that absolute zero is unattainable (third law). In colloquial terms, these have been paraphrased as: "You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't quit the game."
By framing this as "the universe is a garbage place that never does any work for free," the comic captures the essentially pessimistic character of thermodynamics — it is the branch of physics that tells you what you cannot do. The humor comes from the contrast between the formal, rigorous science and the casual, cynical way it is described, as if the founders of the field were just bitter realists who decided to formalize their disappointment with the universe.