Remember when the dial-up tone was the symphony of enlightenment, when the World Wide Web promised a brave new world filled with free-flowing knowledge? We were sure the internet would spawn a generation of enlightened humans, erudite scholars armed with the collective wisdom of mankind. And then… memes happened. Cat videos happened. And somehow, the flat earth theory happened… again!

In the spirit of this peculiar retrograde revolution, we present 31 memes that provide a lighter (and significantly flatter) perspective on science. They’re fun, they’re witty, and while they may not earn you a Nobel Prize, they might just help you understand Schrödinger’s cat… or at least make you chuckle about not understanding it.

So brace yourself for a comical journey from the quantum realm to the edges of the observable universe (which is round, by the way). Let’s laugh at the ironies, the oddities, and yes, even the sometimes incomprehensible realities of science. Because, when all’s said and done, who doesn’t love a good particle joke, especially when it doesn’t follow the standard model?