superluminal
Original: superluminal on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1: Imagine you have a giant spotlight that you aim at a screen ten trillion miles away and a trillion miles wide.
Panel 2: The spotlight's beam is one degree wide, expanding out to reach the width of the screen.
Panel 3: You flick your hand in front of the spotlight.
Panel 4: Your hand crosses the beam in one second, and the shadow it casts traverses through the giant screen.
Panel 5: The shadow must therefore also cross the trillion-mile-wide screen in one second.
Panel 6: Thus, the shadow moves far faster than the speed of light.
Panel 7: Of course, none of the photons go faster than light. Your hand doesn't move faster than light, nor does the screen.
Panel 8: This is the difference between real and fake.
Panel 9: Real stuff, like us, is stuck behind a cosmic speed limit. But the shadow of reality goes as fast as they like.
Panel 10: I think I would waggle my fingers so a giant finger-man would run across the screen.
Panel 11 (bottom caption): One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Votey:
Large hand-lettered text: "IGNORANT SWINE!" written twice, above a crude drawing of a pig (swine) with its head bowed down.
Panel 2: The spotlight's beam is one degree wide, expanding out to reach the width of the screen.
Panel 3: You flick your hand in front of the spotlight.
Panel 4: Your hand crosses the beam in one second, and the shadow it casts traverses through the giant screen.
Panel 5: The shadow must therefore also cross the trillion-mile-wide screen in one second.
Panel 6: Thus, the shadow moves far faster than the speed of light.
Panel 7: Of course, none of the photons go faster than light. Your hand doesn't move faster than light, nor does the screen.
Panel 8: This is the difference between real and fake.
Panel 9: Real stuff, like us, is stuck behind a cosmic speed limit. But the shadow of reality goes as fast as they like.
Panel 10: I think I would waggle my fingers so a giant finger-man would run across the screen.
Panel 11 (bottom caption): One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Votey:
Large hand-lettered text: "IGNORANT SWINE!" written twice, above a crude drawing of a pig (swine) with its head bowed down.
Alt text
An eleven-panel SMBC comic in muted purple-grey tones, mostly a narrated thought experiment. The premise: a giant spotlight aims at a screen ten trillion miles away and a trillion miles wide, its one-degree beam spreading out to fill the whole screen. A hand flicks in front of the spotlight; its shadow crosses the trillion-mile-wide screen in one second, so the shadow appears to move faster than light. The comic clarifies that no photons, the hand, or the screen actually move faster than light, this is the difference between 'real' and 'fake': real things obey the cosmic speed limit, but shadows (the 'shadow of reality') can move as fast as they like. The narrator muses they would waggle their fingers to make a giant finger-man run across the screen. The bottom panel caption reads: 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' Votey (aftercomic): bold hand-lettered text reading 'IGNORANT SWINE!' twice, with a crude drawing of a pig with its head bowed.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.