Editing 1861: Quantum

The comic depicts a relationship between how philosophically exciting the questions in a field of study are, versus how many years are required to understand the answers.  For example, special relativity poses very complicated philosophical questions - something like "Are our observations about the universe true for everyone, or are they merely relative to our current frame of reference?" But it doesn't take a lot of mathematical knowledge to understand the answer - that when objects move very close to the speed of light, time slows down and their lengths contract. Hence, Special Relativity is very high up on the y-axis but not very far on the x-axis.  Basic physics is not very philosophically interesting but also not very complicated.  Fluid dynamics is very complicated, but it's concerned with a very specific topic - how water or other fluids flow around - so it doesn't lead to big philosophical questions.

The "danger zone" in the top right of the chart is when a field of study is wide-ranging enough to pose broad philosophical questions, and also so complicated that most people can't answer those questions.  Quantum mechanics deals with some very strange concepts that readily lend themselves to philosophical questions, such as the idea that merely observing something can change it, or the idea that something can be both a wave and a particle at the same time.  However, the explanation for those phenomena is a very complicated piece of math, which means that most people don't have accurate answers to those questions. Randall suggests that this is the reason why so many people have "weird ideas" about quantum mechanics.

The title text references the {{w|Insane Clown Posse}} song "{{w|Miracles (Insane Clown Posse song)|Miracles}}", made memetic by the lyric "Fucking magnets, how do they work?!"  An axis is the direction on a graph in which some quantity is increasing or decreasing.  So things that are far along the "miracle" axis are presumably more miraculous.  As you move from bottom-left to top-right on the graph, items become both more philosophically interesting and harder to understand.  It would be fair to describe something that's hard to understand and raises big philosophical questions as a "miracle."

[A chart with the Y-axis titled "How Philosophically Exciting the Questions Are to a Novice Student" and the X-axis titled "How Many Years it Takes to Understand the Answers". The upper-right portion of the chart is labeled "Danger Zone". The following topics are charted as follows:

*Basic Physics: low excitement, low understanding

*Fluid Dynamics: low excitement, high understanding

*Magnets: medium excitement, medium understanding

*General Relativity: medium excitement, high understanding (in the danger zone)

*Special Relativity: high excitement, low understanding

*Quantum Mechanics: high excitement, high understanding (in the danger zone)]