There is no such thing as too much recursion.

xkcdexplainedexplained:

xkcdexplained:

It can be assumed that the Author, while watching a television show by himself, heard the line “the moment my brother died, I felt a searing pain in my heart” and immediately sprung from his bean bag chair to write down the line and a single word: “PHYSICS!” That word was then underlined and circled, thus beginning the creation of another scientific-concept-transposed-into-real-life cartoon.

In the cartoon we see a man describing the grief he felt during his brother’s death to a second man. The second man, a physicist, is then shown giving three possible verbal responses that serves as examples for right, wrong and very wrong answers.

The first response is a simple condolence that one would expect for the given situation. The hilarity begins in the second response, in which the physicist takes the word “moment” into the context of his profession, specifically within the topic of causality (cause and effect). He asks if the pain felt (effect) truly happened in the same moment as the brother’s death (cause), or if there was a delay from the speed of light - the maximum speed at which information can travel according to physics.

The third and most ludicrous response from the physicist has him imagining an experiment involving the killing of the first man’s other siblings in order order to use the instantaneous cause and effect to violate the rules of causality and send signals back in time.

There you have it readers, the Author has managed to turn a man’s death into a homographic pun involving physics and time travel.

The author of this explanation has a curious definition of the word “hilarity.” It appears that his personal definition is something along the lines of: “uninteresting (though slightly horrifying) inside joke.”

NOTE: Based on a sample size of eight people, it’s been my experience that physicists are really awesome people. Therefore, it’s fair to assume that none of them would ever actually say the above-mentioned things, unless they were saying them so someone who was a huge douche. In other words, physicists do not have Asperger’s.

The metaexplaintionist obviously does not understand the inherent hilarity of imposing physics or, more specifically, “PHYSICS!!” upon metaphysical and other non-literal constructs. This is a definition of hilarity that this curator has observed in such disparate geek paths as physicists, chemists, biologists and mathmagicians. Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy fans tend to refer to it as “A new definition of ‘hilarity’ of which I was previously unaware”, thus exposing their tenancy to madlib-quote Douglas Adams at any and all opportunities.

NOTE: Based on a sample size that would get any reputable wikipedia article laughed out of Featured status, it has also been the curator’s experience that whilst nobody without some kind of Asperger’s type condition would recreate the above comic’s conversation, this does not stop them finding the above quite funny.

Also some physicists do have Asperger’s Syndrome.

Also, the increased level of exclamation marks around the above emboldened, italicised, cool-cruise-controlled explaination are deliberate, traditionally used to denote agreement with the said abuse of science.

Also, Kittens.

There’s no good reason for the kittens, and why would there need to be?