Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gender-2
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
692 points (95.6% liked)
Comic Strips
24076 readers
4 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
Rules
-
π Be Nice!
- Treat others with respect and dignity. Friendly banter is okay, as long as it is mutual; keyword: friendly.
-
ποΈ Community Standards
- Comics should be a full story, from start to finish, in one post.
- Posts should be safe and enjoyable by the majority of community members, both here on lemmy.world and other instances.
- Any comic that would qualify as raunchy, lewd, or otherwise draw unwanted attention by nosy coworkers, spouses, or family members should be tagged as NSFW.
- Moderators have final say on what and what does not qualify as appropriate. Use common sense, and if need be, err on the side of caution.
-
𧬠Keep it Real
- Comics should be made and posted by real human beans, not by automated means like bots or AI. This is not the community for that sort of thing.
-
π½οΈ Credit Where Credit is Due
- Comics should include the original attribution to the artist(s) involved, and be unmodified. Bonus points if you include a link back to their website. When in doubt, use a reverse image search to try to find the original version. Repeat offenders will have their posts removed, be temporarily banned from posting, or if all else fails, be permanently banned from posting.
- Attributions include, but are not limited to, watermarks, links, or other text or imagery that artists add to their comics to use for identification purposes. If you find a comic without any such markings, it would be a good idea to see if you can find an original version. If one cannot be found, say so and ask the community for help!
-
π Post Formatting
- Post an image, gallery, or link to a specific comic hosted on another site; e.g., the author's website.
- Meta posts about the community should be tagged with [Meta] either at the beginning or the end of the post title.
- When linking to a comic hosted on another site, ensure the link is to the comic itself and not just to the website; e.g.,
β Correct: https://xkcd.com/386/
β Incorrect: https://xkcd.com/
-
π¬ Post Frequency/SPAM
- Each user (regardless of instance) may post up to five (5 π) comics a day. This can be any combination of personal comics you have written yourself, or other author's comics. Any comics exceeding five (5 π) will be removed.
-
π΄ββ οΈ Internationalization (i18n)
- Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
SΓ, por favor [Spanish/EspaΓ±ol]
- Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
-
πΏ Moderation
- We are human, just like most everybody else on Lemmy. If you feel a moderation decision was made in error, you are welcome to reach out to anybody on the moderation team for clarification. Keep in mind that moderation decisions may be final.
- When reporting posts and/or comments, quote which rule is being broken, and why you feel it broke the rules.
Banned Artists
The following artists are banned from the community.
- Jago
- Stonetoss
It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.
Web Accessibility
Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.
When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:
Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)
Web of Links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So until around 1902, it was near unanimously agreed that light was a wave, because it does all the stuff that waves do, like diffracting β we wouldn't have rainbows, or the cool Pink Floyd album cover with a prism splitting light into a rainbow otherwise.
What changed in 1902 is that an experiment (called the photoelectric effect, if you're curious) produced results that would have only been possible if light was a particle. The photoelectric effect had been observed a bunch of times through the 1800s, but in 1902, a variant of the experiment produced results that would be impossible to explain if light were a wave. So then people start asking "okay, maybe we were wrong, maybe light is actually a particle". Except that didn't square with the centuries of evidence showing that light was a wave.
It turns out that light is both a particle and as wave. Or maybe neither. Because the key concept here is that particles and waves don't exist. They're just conceptual categories that we made to put boxes around phenomena to make them more understandable, much the same way that binary gender is a simplifying framework that works until it doesn't.
Now, this doesn't mean that the underlying phenomena, like light being diffracted, or the photoelectric effect, aren't real. The problem was in our framework of how we labelled them. Once physicists got their head around the possibility that light could be both a particle and a wave, they realised that there were a bunch of other situations where we could model light as a particle and discover interesting stuff. Most people don't need to understand this, because the simplified model of everything being either a particle or a wave works well enough that even if it's not correct, it's still useful β these categories developed for a reason, after all. By analogy, it's like if I said "women have breasts". It's true in most instances, so it can still be a useful observation, even if it's not strictly accurate.
However, it gets even more interesting. At first, scientists thought that light must just be a special kind of phenomenon, able to exhibit both particle and wave characteristics. But then, in the double slit experiment, they found that under certain circumstances, electrons (which were near unanimously considered to be particles) could diffract β i.e. act like waves. This was the result that really drove home the notion that when we're studying stuff that are super small and specific, our existing rules and categories sort of fall apart. It's even been suggested that other things that we squarely consider to be particles could show wave nature too, but the larger you get in scale, the harder it is to observe quantum phenomena (which basically just means that our rules work well when they're applied to the circumstances we developed those rules under. "Quantum phenomena" mostly just means "shit that happens when we're so zoomed in that our existing frameworks stop working")
In a sense, we could say that light behaving as a particle is analogous to a non binary man, and electrons behaving as a wave is analogous to a non binary woman. Maybe it would be more sensible to dispense with these categories entirely, but there are many phenomena and many people who find the terms useful.
This is great, thanks!
Glad you liked it. I always appreciate an opportunity to practice my science communication skills (I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO FIND THIS STUFF AS DEEPLY FASCINATING AS I DO. I AM EXTREMELY NORMAL.)