this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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Science Memes

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Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



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If you are here asking: "Is this a science meme?"

Probably, yes. We use the Dawkins definition of meme: a replicating idea, not just an image macro with a fact on it. A good post here doesn't need to teach you something. It needs to make you ask something: who, what, where, when, and especially why or how.

Science isn't a filing cabinet of facts, it's a conversation. For example, a photo of an eel or other localized wildlife counts because most people never see one, and wonder is the first step of inquiry. A car meme counts if it makes you curious about what's under the bonnet. If you want to talk about something you noticed in the world, chances are someone else wants to talk about it too.

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See the pinned paper on Shitposting as Public Pedagogy if you want the academic case for why this works.



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[–] tomiant@piefed.social 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Idk if you can measure what area a hole takes up it has dimensions doesn't it?

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 3 points 6 months ago

I’m being tongue in cheek of course and this is more a matter of philosophy and ontology than math and physics, but one could claim that the hole itself does not exist, it is the absence of matter, so what you are measuring is not the hole but rather the distance between any two points of matter. Otherwise one could point to nothing and claim that it is a hole of any size (like pointing to the sky and simply defining some part of it a hole of a certain size- it would effectively be a meaningless proposition in some sense).

But again, it is truly just silly semantics. :)

[–] PaintedSnail@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

But can you measure something that doesn't exist? Can the absence of something be something in and of itself? Is it the hole you are measuring, or the object around the hole?

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 1 points 6 months ago

No but a void exists as defined by the matter around it

Yes we just did this

Both

Philosophy is easy