From cats to cars, films, and anthropology, these days there really isn’t a subject that doesn’t have a dedicated meme page or ten about it. Naturally, science and physics in particular are no exception.
The “Physics Meme” Instagram page shares funny and brainy posts all about science, scientists, and their trials and tribulations. So get comfortable, break out your scientific calculator, and scroll through these memes. Be sure to upvote your favorites and comment your thoughts below.
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While most of the information in these sorts of meme pages is pretty lighthearted, created to evoke a chuckle or two from viewers, memes are also a great way to share some simple information in a way that is easy to process and retain. So if you want a quick refresher on some physics, internet posts can often do the job faster than your old notes from middle school.
Of course, this sort of quick, humorous information often does cut corners to explain a concept here or there. So it can be worth quickly debunking some common misconceptions. First and foremost, an object's weight isn’t what makes it easy to push and pull, instead, it is inertia. In other words, massively heavy objects in space do still require some effort to move, despite their weightlessness.
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In other words, in space, an object is weightless, yet it won’t feel as “light as a feather” (in Earth’s gravity). This caveat is really not important to remember for 99% of the population but given that a lot of physics research focuses on space, it still remains an important detail. And this way, you can claim that you simply have a lot of inertia, whenever you need an excuse for stubbornness.
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And speaking of space, most of us probably have a very incorrect idea of how large, research telescopes function. While the hobbyist variants that we can buy in stores aren’t that different from the ones used by Galileo or Nicolaus Copernicus, the ones used by major space agencies actually rely on gathering very specific types of light and waves, like x-rays and radio waves.
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Even our basic discussions of space much resemble the physics problems we had to solve in school. Ignore air resistance, was a classic, or the assertion that some action was happening in a vacuum. Similarly, we assume that, in space, we are weightless. However, even in space, there is still some gravitational pull. Not much on a lone astronaut, but on a planet, quite a bit more.
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Much of our interaction with space does come through sending people and bits of technology into orbit or even further. To do this, naturally, we need rockets. Rockets, as one might guess, are quite complicated. “It’s not rocket science!” one might exclaim about something relatively easy, unless, of course, it really is rocket science.
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A common misconception about rockets is that rockets “push” their payload forward. Once you take into account the fact that they still work in space, where there is nothing to push off of, you realize that, actually, they simply move the object in the opposite direction of themselves. If that was confusing, don’t fret, it is, after all, actually rocket science.
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