this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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Science Memes
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I can’t quite get over the fact that the premise is false
Memes like this are so dumb. Laugh tracks for the internet.
no science teacher would ever say that.
Light travels in a straight line, plenty of crystals, linear erosion, many trees evolved to be as straight as possible...
and to be esoteric, every object path, even when gravity affects them (they travel in a perfectly straight line, but it is spacetime that is curved).
I work in public education. That's a pretty innocuous statement compared to some of the shit I've heard. Some teachers get so complacent in their lessons that they forget to apply it in their critical-thinking. Then, they have some crazy logical lapse, say something ridiculous out loud, and then some other kid from that class repeats that same shit to their own students when they grow up. These are mistakes that could easily be rectified with an apology or deliberate correction, but teachers are pushed so hard to prioritize being an authority figure that they sometimes forget to just be a teacher.
I'm going to pull a no true Scotsman, no good teacher would say that.
yhea, there are teachers that lose it a bit.
You'll hear no arguments from me.
Careful with those absolute statements there buddy. I was told the same by a teacher, who challenged the class to come up with natural examples of either straight lines or perfect circles. He talked about how such things cannot exist because at high enough resolution/magnification there will always be interruptions.
Your own example of light traveling in straight lines doesn't account for the fact that photons are waves and absolutely do not travel in straight lines.
It travels in a straight line, just not in every dimension. Look at a waveform from above, it's a straight line.
Uh...
Oh sure, bring evidence into it 🙄 lol. Um, how about sound waves?
Sound waves are compressive waves, they radiate spherically (in principle, turbulence in the medium is going to make them slightly irregular)
Neat!
that's just silly
Is it inaccurate?
Apparently it is
they do tavel in a perfectly straight line though.
space time is curved, not the light path.
False because they are affected by gravity, even if ever so slightly
But isn't the gravity bending the space, so the light itself is travelling straight but seems curved to the observer?
Hmm, I’m not actually sure. Are we also ignoring refraction and reflection because the path is straight between those? If we’re talking discrete photons, you may be correct about each segment in its path being perfectly straight, but I’m not a theoretical physicist.
"through vacuum"
gravity isn't a force, it's the curvature of space-time itself.
light follows a perfectly straight line through vacuum. the space itself isn't straight.
like drawing a straight line on a flat paper, if you roll the paper, that line is still straight within it's medium.
Newtonian gravity has been replaced by General relativity, and has been proven to be the correct model (at least more correct than Newtonian gravity).
Makes sense to me. Thanks
Only a Sith!
Photons are both particles and waves, not only waves (that's because of the wave-particle duality discovered by/after Einstein's theories).
In that case that Pyrite proves nothing.
We can say that spatially, the summation of the photons movement is linear, but everything in the universe is waves and curves and we all know that to be true
if by straight you mean a perfect eucledian line, then there's no such thing as a perfect line in nature or reality.
as that might violate the Eisenberg Uncertainty principle. because if I know two points position or or if I know the direction and one point I'll know the position and direction of every point.
but then that's too esoteric.
You are clearly full of shit and have no idea what you're talking about, and your flip-flopping between positions
it's a meme channel, it's a stupid question, you get stupid answers.
I'm not putting my name in a paper saying definitely of straight exist in nature.
If straight didn't exist in nature, it would just be gays and nothing would ever procreate.
Heterosexuality is extremely rare in nature, mose animals have a lot of gay going on.
Counterpoint: shut the fuck up
you literally have the power to shut people up at will, just block em, faster and more effective.
Your username has a typo in it
Don't do drugs.
Wayyy to late partner
It's useful as a navigational aid, if you're lost in the woods keeping an eye open for straight lines, especially horizontal, is a good way of finding man made structures and potentially a way out. Beyond that, on a micro scale nature loves perfect geometry.
Yeah, it's a very stupid concept made into a very stupid meme to make dumb people feel dopamine over the concept of scientists being allegedly dumber than them.
I really hate our species sometimes.