Electron was discovered in 1897. If you own a textbook on chemistry which is older than that, put it up on Ebay in the antiques category.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
1263 points (98.5% liked)
memes
22309 readers
2857 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Newton lived in the 17th century, so if you got a textbook older than that give it back to the museum
load more comments
(1 replies)
Web development: Oh, that textbook is obsolete. It was written last year before Angular v18 was released.
*French SpongeBob voice
"2 hours later"
load more comments
(4 replies)
Programming: that book was printed a month ago, and it's already obsolete.
load more comments
(1 replies)
But math does change, and it has a lot in the last 1000 years.
Math doesn't change, we just learn more about it.
The mathematical knowledge we had thousands of years ago is still true, and it always will be.
Math doesn't change, we just learn more about it.
Isn't that true of almost all the sciences?
The difference is that if something is proven mathematically it's 100% certain and will not change. In other sciences you may be taught things that later turn out to be flat out wrong.
Bingo, I was taught in genetics class in the 1990s that RNA played a role but DNA was the primary driver and now my understanding is the current consensus is RNA is the primary driver.
When I was growing up, Minnie was the primary Driver, but now the consensus says that it's Adam.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Not quite. Science is empirical, which means it's based on experiments and we can observe patterns and try to make sense of them. We can learn that a pattern or our understanding of it is wrong.
Math is inductive, which means that we have a starting point and we expand out from there using rules. It's not experimental, and conclusions don't change.
1+1 is always 2. What happens to math is that we uncover new ways of thinking about things that change the rules or underlying assumptions. 1+1 is 10 in base 2. Now we have a new, deeper truth about the relationship between bases and what "two" means.
Science is much more approximate. The geocentric model fit, and then new data made it not fit and the model changed. Same for heliocentrism, Galileos models, Keplers, and Newtons. They weren't wrong, they were just discovered to not fit observed reality as well as something else.
A scientific discovery can shift our understanding of the world radically and call other models into question.
A mathematical discovery doesn't do that. It might make something more clear, easier to work with, or provide a technique that can be surprisingly applicable elsewhere.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Has anything changed in Euclid's Elements?
We discovered one of the postulates was really interesting to fuck with.
It's better to say that we've discovered more math, some of which changes how we understand the old.
Since Euclid, we've made discoveries in how geometry works and the underpinnings of it that can and have been used to provide foundation for his work, or to demonstrate some of the same things more succinctly. For example, Euclid had some assumptions that he didn't document.
Since math isn't empirical, it's rarely wrong if actually proven. It can be looked at differently though, and have assumptions changed to learn new things, or we can figure out that there are assumptions that weren't obvious.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Computer programming books ... Lol we don't print them any more, they'd be obsolete before hitting the shelves.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Computer Science:
Oh, that textbook is outdated. That was before NodeJS 22.
Or: The new version is reimplemented and incompatible, so everything you learnt about it from the previous versions is wrong.
load more comments
(1 replies)
For me its like "oh great a old textbook, now i can finally understand our legacy codebase".
load more comments
(2 replies)
Philosopher to the right of the mathematician: "You're welcome for the axioms"
load more comments
(2 replies)
Mathematics ^teacher^: That textbook was written thousands of years ago, and it is still as useful and relevant as ever, but I want you to buy this one I co-authored instead for the mere sum of $120, otherwise you won't pass.
load more comments
(9 replies)
Theres a lovely scene in Star Trek where Picard is captured, then finds an exposed wire on the cell panel. He takes it and begins tapping out prime numbers, to show to the aliens’ mathematicians that they’re sentient and capable of thought, independent of language.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Software Development: You bought a textbook?
"Oh, that blog post is obsolete. It was written before version 1.87.0d.20250304.nightly"
"It's okay, I'll just ask ChatGPT."
Asks ChatGPT about new feature.
ChatGPT makes up a completely fictional answer that sounds plausible given the state of the repository two years ago.
"That's great! I'd love to help you discover the exciting world of programming! The best language for a starter is probably HTML, which stands for Hypertext Text Machine Learning Code 5. You can write HTML in an environment which is a kind of software. The best environments for creating HTML are:
- VSCode
- Visual Studio Code
- Code
- HTML
- Eclipse
- Visual FoxPro
- Visual Basic
- Visual C+++
- Borland Turbo
- Pascal
- Vienna
- Innsbruck
- Salzburg
Remember to install your favourite using one or more supported environments. Begin with something basic and work up from there. You'll be in no time. Have fun! Or should I say, Have Fun!"
load more comments
(1 replies)
As nearly always, there is a relevant xkcd.
On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
As a kid I thought Pythagoras was silly for making a math cult. Now that I'm older I get it.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I love that Eratosthenes was able to estimate the circumference of the earth with the amount of math we had in his era. Meanwhile, modern flat-earthers are still making me want to vomit.
I used to see fractals in the shadows on LSD. I couldn’t think of the word “fractal,” and told my friend, “You know, that thing in math?” And he said to me, “When you trip you see math?!” Fun times. To be a teen again.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Wrong for physics. Models to describe reality don't magically become wrong just because a model with better predictive power is discovered. Most old models are special cases of newer ones.
Yeah, Newton wasn't just a science bitch who is wrong, sometimes. His equations are the special case of General Relativity when acceleration is very low. Which is the world we live in.
My favorite way to connect people with academia is pointing out how recently zero was invented because even the most reluctant “I don’t know math” person understands zero these days.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Math is a thought game with axioms as rules. It’s much more stable since the rules are “self-evident”.
Fuck you professor, its a 35 line proof, and it isn't as trivial as you think it is!
It's actually a 36 line proof, so this question is wrong and you score a 50 on the test.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
That $300 stack of the cheapest thin paper was last semester. The online code you need for class is void, and the questions won't match the answer key.
Physics books are never outdated, you just discover better models that work in a wider range of conditions.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Science is validated by the new information replacing the old. Al-Khwarizmi worked out numbers so we don’t have to,
The really funny part is the other two are also just math.
The fabric of reality is woven from math, and that's beautiful.
I've got a pet theory that a hypothetical alien species' music would be more recognizably similar to humans' than their biology would.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
“It was made up 2000 years ago and is the absolute final word in everything. Well, the parts I pick and choose to fit my own beliefs.” -every religion there is
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›