Rachel Lucas explains it in her “Scenes from Chem Lab”:
[I]t was a thick solution. It drip-drip-dripped very slowly through the funnel. So guess what my genius lab partner and a few other brain surgeons in the class decided would be a good way to speed it up?
Why, move the funnel apparatus as high up on the clamp stand as possible, as far away from the beaker as possible! Because somehow, in some alternate universe with vastly different laws of physics than we know here on Earth, that would make the solution move through the funnel more quickly.
I am not making this up.
When Lab Partner started doing this, all spastically as is his way, I told him that all he was accomplishing was making the drips splash harder into the beaker and even out of the beaker entirely. Pretty much, he was just making a mess. He was steadfast, and kept telling me to just watch. “It goes faster!”
I asked him if the solution in the funnel knew where the beaker was and he stared at me like I was being obtuse. I asked again, how could the distance between the two possibly have any effect whatsoever on how fast the solution came out of the funnel because after all, it doesn’t know how far it has to fall, and it doesn’t care. He shushed me and told me to watch.
Pressing on, I asked him if there is some sort of magical force field between the funnel and the beaker, and if he was positing that the beaker was sending a message to the liquid in the funnel, hey I’m far away, you better get through that funnel quickly! I wondered out loud if he knew some special law of physics I’d never heard of. He shook his head and kept repeating, “just watch, just watch.”
It was painful. And the thing is, it wasn’t even only him. Several other groups at our counter were doing the same thing. I was struck speechless and had no choice but to stand there and search for an argument in my brain that did not involve calling anyone “retarded.”
It only went on for about a minute because as soon as TA saw what all these Mensa members were doing, with their funnels high in the air, making the drips splash all over the place, he came over to us and asked why, and some of them actually attempted to present their finely-honed Einsteinian theories about how much more quickly the process would go this way. TA and I and the rest of the class that weren’t acting like crackheads all stared blankly at them for a full 10 seconds. One girl across the room loudly said something like, “I hope none of y’all are science majors.”
Sadly, most of them are.
It’s not just special biology physics. They also believe very, very hard in evolution as well. And if you don’t, well, then you’re clearly just not intelligent and educated like them.
Thankfully, that is entirely true.