Wrong
Wrong
[White Hat is walking beside Megan, index finger extended] White Hat: Really, we're all made of antimatter. A proton consists of two quarks and an antiquark. Megan: ...I don't think that's right.
[White Hat stops to take out his smartphone tapping on it. Megan stops and turns towards him.] White Hat: Sure it is. Neutrons are, too. Megan: Do you mean "up" and "down" quarks? I think antiquarks are a different thing. White Hat: No, let me show you... Tap Tap
[Zooming in on White Hat's head, while he is holding his phone up looking at it. He is thinking as shown with a bubbly thought bubble.] White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?
[White Hat has lowered the phone. He is still thinking the same but the text has been scribbled out.] White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?
[White Hat purges the thought from his mind] White Hat (thinking): ...
[Similar setting as in the first panel, but in a full row wide panel, and White Hat is still holding his smartphone] White Hat: Really, the whole idea of "particles" is inaccurate. These are abstractions arising from quantum field theory, but what most people don't realize is... Megan: *Sigh*

All matter that we encounter in everyday life is normal matter and not antimatter . Atoms, while once when they were named believed to be the smallest unit of matter, are now known to be made up of protons , neutrons and electrons . Protons and neutrons are in turn made up of quarks , which are fundamental particles (meaning not made of other particles). Quarks come in six different " flavours " (up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange), with protons and neutrons being made of up and down quarks. Each flavour also has a corresponding antiparticle , an antiquark, which would make up antiprotons and antineutrons.
White Hat and Megan appear to be discussing the topics of antimatter and subatomic particles. White Hat makes the assertion that we (referring to people and objects) are made partially of antimatter, because, as he claims, a proton (one of the particles which make up all matter) is made of two quarks and an antiquark. In fact, protons are made up of two up quarks and a down quark, which are all not antiquarks. He is likely making the mistake of mixing up the "up" and "down" flavours of quarks (which can be seen as complementary flavours of quarks) and mistaking them to be mutual antiparticles. He continues to elaborate on his idea by mentioning neutrons, which are made of two down quarks and an up quark.
When Megan (accurately) doubts his claim, White Hat takes out his smartphone to look it up, in order to show Megan that he is correct. However, upon researching online, he realizes that he was, in fact, wrong (hence the title of the comic). Not wanting to admit being incorrect or yield his position in the discussion, he convinces himself that he wasn't actually wrong, as depicted by his mentally erasing the realization that he was wrong. Instead, he completely changes the topic to try and re-frame it so that he is not wrong. In this case, he circles back and criticizes the entire scientific concept of "particles", which can be seen as an attempt at a straw man on his part. Presumably, he will go on to explain how humans are not made of particles and quarks, but of waves.
It is rather common to be unwilling to admit fault (the whole topic of this comic) and to instead try to maintain an air of infallibility and intelligence. Some people are just too prideful to admit that they are inherently fallible. White Hat is one of those people, as depicted in several of his earlier appearances (see trivia section ). Randall uses this comic to criticize people who are unable to put aside their ego and re-assess what they know in the face of empirical data. Such thinking flies directly against scientific rigor (adding an extra layer of irony to the situation, since White Hat and Megan are discussing a scientific topic). This method had already been called wrong in 803: Airfoil .
White Hat's new topic, where he can be right, includes the quantum field theory , a very complicated field, which it is likely one Megan is not well versed in (inferred by the fact that she was not quite sure about the anti-quarks). So he may be raising the topic because he believes she will not understand it sufficiently to refute his correctness. Megan, however, recognizes exactly what he is trying to do, and can only sigh in response to his failed efforts. In the QFT, particles are often described as resonances or excited states of the underlying physical field, in the same way as photons may be thought of as excitations in the electromagnetic field; in this way White Hat appears to be dismissing his earlier errors by implying that particles are merely an effect of something more complex, of which he can demonstrate his knowledge. Furthermore, in quantum field theory quarks do not exist in the conventional sense.
In the title text, White Hat just remembers another thing he's right about. This demonstrates even more clearly that he is not interested in a discussion on the merits of a topic, but instead is seeking only recognition and validation for being right. This bears some similarity to 386: Duty Calls , in which Cueball stays up late correcting someone on the Internet, and 2051: Bad Opinions , where Cueball actively seeks out people with bad opinions for him to correct.
White Hat may have incorrectly remembered that, while the valence quarks in a proton are all matter, quantum field theory says that protons also contain an indefinite number of "virtual" anti-quarks, quarks, and gluons. See this video What are Quarks? about this. His final comment could be referring to the ontological debate over whether virtual particles are in some sense real or only an artefact of perturbation theory. Alternatively, he may have been confused by the fact that negatively charged quarks contribute negatively to baryon number. <!-- I think that that's incorrect; could you be thinking about strangeness and bottomness instead? I'm not wrong, but let's talk about something else that I'm right about instead. -->
[White Hat is walking beside Megan, index finger extended] White Hat: Really, we're all made of antimatter. A proton consists of two quarks and an antiquark. Megan: ...I don't think that's right.
[White Hat stops to take out his smartphone tapping on it. Megan stops and turns towards him.] White Hat: Sure it is. Neutrons are, too. Megan: Do you mean "up" and "down" quarks? I think antiquarks are a different thing. White Hat: No, let me show you... Tap Tap
[Zooming in on White Hat's head, while he is holding his phone up looking at it. He is thinking as shown with a bubbly thought bubble.] White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?
[White Hat has lowered the phone. He is still thinking the same but the text has been scribbled out.] White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?
[White Hat purges the thought from his mind] White Hat (thinking): ...
[Similar setting as in the first panel, but in a full row wide panel, and White Hat is still holding his smartphone] White Hat: Really, the whole idea of "particles" is inaccurate. These are abstractions arising from quantum field theory, but what most people don't realize is... Megan: *Sigh*
