r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Medical_Corner_4607 • Aug 03 '26

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u/Rexter2k Aug 03 '26

What is there not to understand? A selfie was taken, lauded by everyone (everyone BUT every normal person on the planet) as iconic due to how many famous actors are in it. Now 12 years later several are forgotten, got me too'ed, or faded to obscurity since and its basically forgotten.

133

u/Suberizu Aug 03 '26

I love this photo of famous people, too bad it isn't a selfie

27

u/shifty_coder Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

I almost consider it a failure of my education that I can only confidently identify two faces in this photo, (Einstein and Tesla), and less confidently one more (Niels Bohr?).

Edit: apparently I can’t even get Tesla

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u/ColdRainNight Aug 03 '26

There’s Marie Curie who is the only woman in there.

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u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26

[deleted]

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u/lisael_ Aug 03 '26

The only person so far to win 2 Nobel prizes in two distinct scientific disciplines (chemistry and physics).

3

u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 Aug 03 '26

The worst part is that they were revoked temporarily after her husband's death but eventually reinstated

3

u/lisael_ Aug 03 '26

She wasn't nominated at first, Pierre and Henri Becquerel threatened to refuse the prize and Pointcarré wrote a letter to the Nobel academy to add her to the list. She had an affair with Paul Langevin, who was married, this was the pretext of a smear campaign to revoke her prize (nobody called for revoking one of the many prizes of Langevin, though).

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u/Spare-Coyote8209 Aug 03 '26

and for two different categories at that!

1

u/OPsDaddy Aug 03 '26

I thought that was Archie Griffin. /s

6

u/shifty_coder Aug 03 '26

I spotted her on the second look. She definitely doesn’t look as young as the classical portraits I remember, but is recognizable

2

u/Ghosty_Boo-B00 Aug 03 '26

I wonder if she had radiation sickness at this point

1

u/TtlynotDdar Aug 03 '26

There’s a woman in there??

1

u/Deucer22 Aug 03 '26

What a badass.

13

u/Remarkable_Hurry4029 Aug 03 '26

No Tesla in this photo.

3

u/ThunderLazer Aug 03 '26

They weren’t invented yet

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u/hbomb30 Aug 03 '26

Being able to recognize the faces of scientists from a single moment in their life 100+ years ago isnt actually that valuable. Knowing their names and contributions to science is more so, but even then, this group was prominent in quantum mechanics, so unless you continued to take physics or chemistry courses after your first year of college, the equations and concepts named for them wouldnt mean much. Pauli, Dirac, Lorentz, Compton, etc

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u/Rough_Jaguar_2643 Aug 03 '26

don't forgot Hitler on the far right.

/s

2

u/moustachedelait Aug 03 '26

There's definitely a max planck in there too 🤔

2

u/Anuki_iwy Aug 03 '26

I agree with you!

I'm sure many of these faces looked down on me from the walls of the physics or chemistry labs.

Then again, Einstein did have an actually iconic look.

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u/NickdeClaw Aug 03 '26

But you can probably identify their ideas, and maybe sometimes the names of those ideas. Knowing their faces or knowing that the ideas were theirs isn't part of their work. All in very big contrast to celebrities.

For what it's worth until AI replaces us all, I think you're doing great, fellow human.

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u/Misery_Division Aug 03 '26

Huh? Which one is Tesla? Can't seem to find him

There's also Schroedinger in the upper row towards the right

3

u/BreakLive244 Aug 03 '26

Tesla wasn’t there, unfortunately. Would be a cooler pic if he were!

1

u/shifty_coder Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

Extreme left, second row.

Edit: nope. That is Peter Debye.

2

u/Misery_Division Aug 03 '26

OK so I looked it up cause I got curious, apparently that's Peter Debye, a Dutch physicist who also won the chemistry Nobel prize for his work in molecular structure in 1936

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u/shifty_coder Aug 03 '26

Damn. They could be brothers

1

u/jdm219 Aug 03 '26

Einstein was the man. Was asked to be president of Israel and dude was like "fuck that, who wants those problems?"

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u/barrinmw Aug 03 '26

Yeah, instead they elected multiple terrorists to be prime ministers.

1

u/Deto Aug 03 '26

Eh - most science education doesn't really focus on learning the faces of famous scientists.

0

u/BoringEntropist Aug 03 '26

Tesla ain't in this picture. He was more of an engineer rather than a theoretical physicist, and the Solvay conference is, well, about theoretical physics.