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| Beam Pipe |
 Title text: 'If you keep trying to spray your collaborators with the beam when they're not looking, I'm turning off the ion source and NO one will get to play with the beam!' --Physics's mom |
Explanation
With pipes such as hosepipes, you can make the water come out in a more rapid and (if done right) more concentrated stream by covering up part of the exit nozzle with your finger (or anything, for that matter). This forces the water to come out of a smaller space, increasing the effective pressure. As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be considered a sort of 'pipe' (a beam pipe, as pointed out in the comic title) this comic makes the ridiculous assumption that the same logic applies there, and its beam can be concentrated and redirected by partially covering the end of the beam. This wouldn't work in real life: the relativistic particles would not behave as a liquid. It may be that they would annihilate the thumb (or possibly just mildly irradiate it, depending upon intensity) and create a broad spray, instead of narrowing the beam. In any case, the pipe being open-ended (or partly so, with the thumb half over it) would already have destroyed the vacuum-like conditions necessary to properly maintain the particle beam, without some vacuum-sealing cap or internal bulkhead, which the beam must already have passed through.
The title text expands the joke, once more treating the LHC as if it were a hosepipe. Applying the effect above to a hosepipe is a common thing for children to do β often to spray family and friends with the pressurized water. This applies the same logic to the LHC, imagining the mother of "Physics" (the science, as opposed to a person) telling off their (presumably adult) child for 'spraying their colleagues with the beam' β something very incomprehensible in real life.
Transcript
- [A picture shows a (partly obscured by the panel) particle accelerator (namely this one being the Large Hadron Collider at CERN). Megan is shown on a stepladder, covering the beam pipe with her thumb. Cueball is shown standing behind the ladder, watching.]
- [Caption below the panel:]
- This year's physics Nobel will go to the scientists who figured out that you could make the Large Hadron Collider more powerful by covering part of the beam pipe with your thumb.
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