3061: Water Balloons
| Water Balloons |
 Title text: Update: The physics department has recruited an astronomer who studies meteor fireballs. |
Explanation
The comic graphs the mass vs. the lifetime of three objects: mesons, water balloons and planets. Mesons, which are subatomic particles, have a very low mass and a very short lifetime, as they naturally decay into other fundamental particles.[actual citation needed] "Flying water balloons" are depicted as having a mass centered around 1 kilogram, but the area outlined covers a very broad range of mass (from grams to hundreds of kilos), and a lifetime centered around 1 second (but the area outlined covers from fractions of a second to a couple of hours), indicating the approximate amount of time that a water balloon is expected to be in the process of being thrown through the air. Not all water balloons break on impact, and they may be prepared well in advance, so specifying "flying" indicates that it isn't the lifetime of the intact (and water-filled) balloon. Additionally, some are thrown directly into someone's face, thus their flight time would be extremely short, or non-existant if 'planted' before even being released. Finally, planets have a very large mass and a very long lifetime, as they tend to exist for billions of years.
This comparison is somewhat absurd because the objects being compared - mesons, water balloons, and planets - do not have much in common. The joke is revealed in the image caption: an "annual interdepartmental water balloon fight" where multiple departments of a facility/company are pit against each other.
Allegedly, because water balloons are so different from both mesons and planets in terms of size and lifetime (roughly the same number of orders of magnitude), meson particle physicists and planetary scientists are usually evenly matched in water balloon fights. This suggests that deep specialization in a field of study deprives a normal person of their basic aptitude to perform in more 'everyday' activities, but at least it equally disadvantages each of the two teams of researchers and makes for a more satisfyingly competitive match-up than with one team clearly far more proficient than the other. By the same logic, one might assume that more generalized physicists might study similar objects with the mass and lifetime of water balloons (if not water balloons themselves!), and other topics of education might also confer an 'advantage' (for example, biologists may study similarly-sized bodies of creatures, whilst chemists may monitor chemical reactions that could take an equivalent time to complete).
In real life, water balloon fights are completely unrelated to particle physics or planetary science, and there's nothing stopping a particle physicist or planetary scientist from also having experience with water balloons.
The title text continues the joke by stating that "The physics department has recruited an astronomer who studies meteor fireballs". This is likely referring to the fact that meteors are closer in size and lifetime to water balloons than either mesons or planets, so having an astronomer with this area of expertise would be advantageous in a water balloon fight against scientists who study either of the latter. "Space rocks" that become meteors may have been around for approximately the age of the solar system (and longer than at least some planets), and may then sit on/beneath the ground as a meteorite for anything up to geologically significant lengths of time. But being an actual meteor (and a flaming one, at that) implies we're only considering the period of time the space rock is traveling through the Earth's atmosphere, specifically ending when it becomes a meteorite. This is a period of time that may be anything from a few seconds (the normal upper limit to the visible 'fireball' stage) to possibly a minute or two (starting from its first shallow-angle grazing of the atmosphere until it finally lands/burns up/passes back out of the atmosphere). Thus, by one team bringing in a more capable player (especially one arguably more closely aligned to their opponents), they apparently now have an unfair advantage.
Extrapolation and interpolation, often absurd, are recurrent topics on xkcd. For example, in 3050:Atom, an atom was blown up to the size of a water balloon, with the responsible scientists complaining about it being wet.
Transcript
- [Graph with Y axis labeled "Mass" running from 10-30 kg to 1030 kg on a logarithmic scale and X axis labeled "Lifetime", also on a logarithmic scale, running from 10-20 to 1020 seconds.]
- [There are three elliptical blobs on the graph: one on the lower left corner labeled "Mesons", another on the upper right corner labeled "Planets", and another in the middle (1kg mass, 1s lifespan) labeled "Flying water balloons". There are two bidirectional arrows pointing from the center blob to the two other blobs.]
- [To the left of the chart are Cueball and Ponytail. Ponytail is throwing a water balloon, and Cueball is dodging from one. To the right are Megan and Hairy. Megan is preparing to throw a water balloon, and Hairy is slipping in a puddle of water, with a water balloon having landed near his foot with a "Sploosh!".]
- [Caption below the panel:]
- In the annual interdepartmental water balloon fight, meson particle physicists and planetary scientists are usually evenly matched, since they're both equally far outside their areas of expertise.
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- WHAT?!??!!!! ⯅A dream demon⯅ (talk) 15:06, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
That "Flying Water Balloons" bubble reaches from about 10-3 to 102 kg. That's 1mg (kinda' hard to manipulate) to 100kg (very hard to lift, especially without breaking the balloon). -- Dtgriscom (talk) 16:59, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
- Firstly: you seem to mix-up g and kg. Secondly: Water balloons can leak, assuming the 10-3 (which is 1g) wasn't measured while it popped in flight.172.71.99.171 10:39, 12 March 2025 (UTC)
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