Physicists
Physicists
[Cueball stands at a blackboard covered in equations and diagrams, an open laptop and scattered paper at his feet. His fists are balled in anger and there is a little angry squiggle over his head. A Cueball-like physicist stands behind him, arms out in a shrug.] Physicist: You're trying to predict the behavior of <complicated system> ? Just model it as a <simple object> , and then add some secondary terms to account for <complications I just thought of> . Physicist: Easy, right? Physicist: So, why does <your field> need a whole journal, anyway?
[Caption below the panel:] Liberal-arts majors may be annoying sometimes, but there's nothing more obnoxious than a physicist first encountering a new subject.

This comic shows a view that many physics students, upon first encountering a well-known problem, think that it is not a difficult problem, since they think they can fix it using an extremely simplified model. The obvious problem with this is that if it was that simple to solve the problem to a useful degree, there wouldn't be an entire department studying the problem. This attitude leads to great annoyance from those who have probably spent years and years working on the problem, hence the Cueball with balled up fists, implying that he wants to punch the physics major.
This argument is similar to the spherical cow , an idea that basic models taught in early physics classes only work in frictionless vacuums, as shown in 669: Experiment .
The title text takes the dismissive attitude to its logical extreme. The comment "liberal-arts majors can be annoying sometimes" seems to be referencing the stereotype that they're all elitist know-it-alls.
Cueball later behaves similarly in 1831: Here to Help .
[Cueball stands at a blackboard covered in equations and diagrams, an open laptop and scattered paper at his feet. His fists are balled in anger and there is a little angry squiggle over his head. A Cueball-like physicist stands behind him, arms out in a shrug.] Physicist: You're trying to predict the behavior of <complicated system> ? Just model it as a <simple object> , and then add some secondary terms to account for <complications I just thought of> . Physicist: Easy, right? Physicist: So, why does <your field> need a whole journal, anyway?
[Caption below the panel:] Liberal-arts majors may be annoying sometimes, but there's nothing more obnoxious than a physicist first encountering a new subject.
