Jupiter left me cold. Neptune even more so.
Now that is a really good one.
And not, of course, only about protons.
Yeah, that one’s going up on my (math dept) office door, but without the rollover text.
The mouseover text is a lot more on point than most folks realize. Part of the calculation of relativistic collisions of particles is something called the propagator… which is, in fact, a description of what the particle is doing when it’s just sitting there.
This is bad enough for electrons, but it’s so much worse for protons, because they’re composite particles. Composite particles bound together by a force that we understand only poorly.
A good article on the crazy internal complexity of the proton:
The 3-quark model is just an approximation of one of the limiting cases. There’s far more going inside than just that.
I was genuinely surprised not to see “Dr Frankenstein is the monster. His unnamed creation is the victim.”
Or “The doctor and the creature are both named Frankenstein, because the creature took on his father’s last name (their first names are Victor and Adam, respectively).”
But those would both have been too normal. He already had two normal entries, at which point it was time to start going weird.
That’s Frankensteen!
Fascinating! (to the extent I understood it)
The second answer could be interpreted as meaning that.
Oh, and the comic says it’s “permutations”, and those six are indeed the possible permutations of author, doctor, and creature.
It’s undercut by the note “not worth getting mad about,” which implies the names are wrong.
Or that the doctor has retained his sanity.
I feel like he’d already done the Down one before…
You try writing nearly 2800 jokes without repeating yourself!