Talk:1489: Fundamental Forces

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 13:45, 21 February 2015 by 141.101.104.77 (talk)
Jump to: navigation, search

«The off-panel audience, probably a student or class, is interested, but quickly begins to realize Cueball's lack of understanding. Instead of acknowledging the problem directly, Cueball simply blusters onwards.»

My interpretation is rather different. It looks like Cueball is a physicist who knows that the distinction of "four fundamental forces" is basically wrong/obsolete (the term "force" is not even used anymore in theoretical physics), but since his audience are high school students, he can't go into the many complex details underlying the fundamental interactions, and therefore is forced to gloss over it. This is confirmed by the title text (if Cueball didn't understand the theory of fundamental interactions, he wouldn't give that answer). --188.114.101.78 10:31, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

To me it appeared as a typical exam situation for Cueball with him being the pupil. And ironically that situation looks similar to the real scientific understanding of the topic. Renormalist (talk) 11:12, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I could see that, to an extent - it doesn't jive with the title text IMO, and it's less funny that a student would be glossing over this stuff than a someone in an instructive role, but I could see it -- Brettpeirce (talk) 11:46, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Irony like this is not uncommon in physics. What was the first encounter with electric phenomena? Triboelectricity. What don't we understand at all? Right. Or take Zenos paradoxon. Or the divisibility paradoxon. The oldest nuts tend to be the toughest. 108.162.230.221 12:26, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the first one, but one of first electromagnetic phenomenons we encountered was light. We first observed it about 200000 years ago. :P 141.101.104.77 13:45, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

I knew from the title, "Fundamental Horses", that this was going to be a great one. 199.27.128.200 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I prefer Chromatic Horse and Flavor Horse. Why use weak names when we have new strong ones? 108.162.254.98 11:58, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

In high school Physics, my class was taught that physicists had recently combined the Electromagnetic and Weak Nuclear forces into the Electro-Weak Force, so there were only three and if we were to find the Higgs Boson, there might be just two or one. 108.162.241.11 21:55, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Actually, it is the Higgs Boson, that combines the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear interaction into the electroweak interaction, so it's still 3. But actually, even if electromagnetism and the weak interaction can be described in one theory, they are still viewed as two different phenomena, so it actually will always be 4. (Unless we discover other interactions). --141.101.105.192 22:23, 20 February 2015 (UTC)