unreasonable
Explanation
This comic tackles the philosophical puzzle of why mathematics is so effective at describing the physical world -- a question famously posed by physicist Eugene Wigner in his 1960 essay "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences."
In the first panel, a student asks: "God, why is math so unreasonably effective?" A teacher begins to respond: "It's not --"
In the second panel, the teacher explains: "Look, the universe only contains like a handful of things. Problem: Humans are no big deal. Something like a billion particles. A trillion, maybe. The universe is like ten to the trillion particles or concepts."
In the third panel, the teacher continues: "So they discover that random motion is the same in a fire and a peter pan trap, the stock market, and they call it profound and deep. Put it on a t-shirt. The same rule. To the same math applies."
The fourth panel delivers the punchline. The student protests: "Please stop insulting God!" and claims: "Math isn't unreasonably effective. It's unreasonably INEFFECTIVE." The idea is that given how few fundamental rules govern the universe, it would be more surprising if math did NOT work. The real mystery is how much of the universe math still cannot describe.
The comic offers a deflationary take on Wigner's famous puzzle. Instead of marveling that math describes the universe so well, the comic argues that the universe is relatively simple (governed by a small number of fundamental laws), so of course a systematic formal language like mathematics would capture those patterns. The "unreasonable" part is not that math works -- it is that humans are so impressed by it working, when the alternative (a universe with no mathematical regularities at all) would be far stranger.