53 Cards
53 Cards
[Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to a flowchart, with Cueball gesturing to it.]: Cueball: I've found a way to turn a 52-card deck into 53 cards by shuffling and rearranging them. Ponytail: No, you haven't. Cueball: How do you know?! I challenge you to find an error in my math!
[The flow chart consist of 15 boxes of different sizes, connected with arrows. In four of them (top, bottom and two in the middle) a deck of card is shown. Next to the top and bottom a number is written, near the other two, which are the only round boxes, numbers are shown in one of the nearby boxes instead. Beneath the top box there are two boxes with readable text. The other 7 boxes, without numbers or card decks have unreadable text. From top to bottom are the readable content:] 52 Shuffle Cut 21 38 53
[Caption below the panel]: Every conversation between a physicist and a perpetual motion enthusiast.

In this comic, Cueball claims that he has found a way to manipulate a 52-card deck into a 53-card deck by shuffling and rearranging the cards, presenting a complex-looking diagram to support his claim. Ponytail naturally disputes the claim immediately, which Cueball counters by challenging Ponytail to prove that his math is wrong.
The comic is a satire of the way that conversations tend to go between physicists and perpetual motion enthusiasts (or cranks in general). Perpetual motion is the idea that it could be possible for a mechanical system to work indefinitely without any external input of energy. The laws of thermodynamics absolutely prohibit this, so the only way that this could be possible is if the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics are some of the most foundational and well-tested laws in science, so perpetual motion is considered to be a pseudoscience , pursued only by ignorant or quixotic cranks.
One of the things that you could do with a perpetual motion machine is to violate the law of conservation of energy - that is, you could create free energy out of nothing, simply by building a mechanical device. This is likely what Randall is satirizing with the idea of a process that can generate an extra card out of nowhere - it makes no physical sense, but nonetheless Cueball is convinced that he has found a way to do it.
A common defense employed by pseudoscientists, when challenged on their ideas, is to issue a counter-challenge and demand people prove them wrong, as Cueball does in this comic. This is a fallacious line of argument, since the fact that Ponytail cannot prove Cueball wrong does not mean that he is right. Nonetheless, this aggressive defense often works to discourage argument, since it takes far less effort to make a claim than to refute it.
Possibly, Cueball's plan involves usage of the Banach-Tarski paradox , a mathematical theorem which describes a method of "dismantling" a solid sphere, rearranging the component pieces, and reassembling them into two solid spheres identical to the original. This is only possible in a mathematical ideal case, because the "component pieces" are actually collections of infinitely many disjoint points; such a procedure cannot be performed in physical reality. Cueball's operations of shuffling and rearranging are analogous to the operations used in the Banach-Tarski operation, which involves only moving and rotating the component pieces without changing their shape. The Banach-Tarski paradox was also referenced in 804: Pumpkin Carving .
In the title text, Ponytail responds to Cueball's challenge with snark, claiming that the most obvious error is the fact that the formula's result is "53". The implication is that his math results in the wrong answer , which is proof that the calculations must contain errors.  This, of course, starts with the assumption that Cueball's claimed result is impossible, rather than attempting to find the flaws in his specific method. Because most people would conclude, by basic physical reasoning, that merely shuffling and rearranging a deck of cards cannot increase the number of cards in the deck, that feels like a safe assumption. By analogy, increasing the amount of energy in a system only by moving and transferring energy should be equally impossible, on its face.
[Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to a flowchart, with Cueball gesturing to it.]: Cueball: I've found a way to turn a 52-card deck into 53 cards by shuffling and rearranging them. Ponytail: No, you haven't. Cueball: How do you know?! I challenge you to find an error in my math!
[The flow chart consist of 15 boxes of different sizes, connected with arrows. In four of them (top, bottom and two in the middle) a deck of card is shown. Next to the top and bottom a number is written, near the other two, which are the only round boxes, numbers are shown in one of the nearby boxes instead. Beneath the top box there are two boxes with readable text. The other 7 boxes, without numbers or card decks have unreadable text. From top to bottom are the readable content:] 52 Shuffle Cut 21 38 53
[Caption below the panel]: Every conversation between a physicist and a perpetual motion enthusiast.
