Prairie
by Jeff
Image text: Colorado is working to develop coherent amber waves, which would allow them to finally destroy Kansas and Nebraska with a devastating but majestic grain laser.
This comic is a reference to the song America The Beautiful, which contains the line "...amber waves of grain...". But, of course, xkcd being xkcd, waves are interpreted in the physics way. In Quantum mechanics, the wave-particle duality explains that particles can act like both particles and waves. In the comic, when they are observing the light from the grain, it is acting like a particle.
However, as the image text says, if Colorado wanted to destroy other states with a coherent wave laser of amber waves, the particles would be acting as waves, like a laser.
Oh yea, in America The Beautiful, "...amber waves of grain..." is used because when the wind blows over a field of grain it looks like waves in the ocean.
Physics people, please let me know in the comics if I went wrong somewhere.
Neutrinos
by Jeff
Image text: I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake).
The "Neutrino speed of light thing" is an actual story from yesterday.
In this comic, Cueball decides instead of arguing with people about the result and preaching caution, he takes money from them in the form of a bet. Cueball's comment is that most of these papers that are supposed to turn the world upside down, end up falling apart after further investigation.
Hofstadter
by Jeff
Image text: "This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke."
Douglas Hofstadter is an American and to quote Wikipedia: "is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics."
So, the one line autobiography is meta because it is also an acronym which reads "IS META".
In the image text, reference implementation is a reference (sorry, it is early, I couldn't think of a synonym of "reference") to the standard implementation during a software development process.
That's as much as I can draw from it. Is there anything else you can get from it?
Teaching Physics
by Jeff
Image text: Space-time is like some simple and familiar system which is both intuitively understandable and precisely analogous, and if I were Richard Feynman I'd be able to come up with it.
This comic is about how it is very difficult to teach Physics because the metaphors that are frequently used are not perfect and for students, it often makes it more difficult. Gravity and the rubber sheet is a common metaphor, but for the student in the comic, it does not make sense how the massive objects are pulled down. And again in the last frame, the metaphor for space-time bores the student. (On a side note, what annoying type of student would say "Boooooring" at your professor/teacher. Brat.)
The image text is what constructs an ideal metaphor because it is "intuitively understandable and precisely analogous". The metaphors in the comic above are not both of those things. Richard Feynman is a famous physicist who worked in a lot of different areas including quantum mechanics. Feynman came up with the Feynman diagrams, which were pictorial representations of the behavior of subatomic particles and their mathematical scheme.
Archimedes
by Jeff
Image text: Give a man a fish, or he will destroy the only existing vial of antidote.
The full Archimedes quote is "Give me a long enough lever and a place to rest it, and I shall move the world."
The full quote in the image text is "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat forever."
The basic idea here is to set up a premise, in this case "In the words of Arichimedes..." and then break up that premise with a joke in the final frame. This is a remarkably simple xkcd compared to others.
Local g
by Jeff
Image text: In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the same jump will get an athlete 0.25% higher (>1cm) than in London four years prior.
Here's the xkcd comic that is cited in the first frame. That comic is a discussion between centrifugal force and centripetal force.
And obviously in this comic, the angry pole vaulters are able to pole vault up to Cueball's balcony to "get" him.
Complex Conjugate
by Jeff
Image text: Fun fact: if you say this every time a professor does something to a complex-number equation that drops the imaginary part, they'll eventually move the class to another room and tell everyone else except you.
Ok, so to understand this comic, you have to understand the phrase "This just got real" or "This shit just got real" which is an American (at least I think its just American) phrase that is said when something turns from a joking situation into an actual confrontation or other serious situation.
In this comic, the Physics professor multiplies the wavefunction by it's complex conjugate which (as it says in the image text) drops the imaginary part, which means they are only working in real numbers. Imaginary numbers are square roots of negative real numbers. Real numbers are all the other number options such as -1, 12 and 42.6.
Guest Week: Bill Amend (FoxTrot)
by Jeff
Image text: Guest comic by Bill Amend of FoxTrot, an inspiration to all us nerdy-physics-majors-turned-cartoonists, of which there are an oddly large number.
The top comic is a reference to this famous xkcd comic. The sudo command in linux allows a user to run as a "super-user", thus allowing them to execute the command they wish.
The next comic is a pun on the word "attractive". The girl thinks he is using it in the fashion that he likes he and is interested in her. He's using it in the gravitational pull way.
The next comic is a reference to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Which, if you read explain xkcd, you should know like the back of your hand.
The third comic, is a play on the sound of the word "aye". Aye is a word used when taking a verbal vote that is used to signify a positive, like yes. Additionally, aye sounds like the letter i. In this case, the mathematician in Congress is voting the square root of -1, which comes out to an imaginary number known as i. And since i sounds the same as "aye", that is how a mathematician votes.
Mutual
by Jeff
Image text: A universe that needed someone to observe it in order to collapse it into existence would be a pretty sorry universe indeed.
In this comic (a rare one without text in the comic portion) both characters are thinking about each other. However, because it is xkcd it is not that simple because one could be thinking about the other thinking about them. Ok, let's see if I can make that clearer. Potentially, Cueball is thinking about the possibility that Cutie (or Megan 
) is thinking about him. Or it could be the opposite way around. Or both.
And the image text adds another layer to the comic. The text is a reference to quantum mechanics and Schrodinger's cat which both say roughly that something may or may not exist (or in the case of Schrodinger's cat - may or may not be alive) until we observe it. In this comic, there are two universe, one with Megan and one with Cueball. Both are separate, but both are thinking of each other, but not observing (or seeing) each other. One could think that they are a great distance apart. In the comic, both characters look extremely sad, since they are not observing each other, merely thinking about each other.
That's what I get from the comic. This looks to be one of those that is open to interpretation. What do you get? Let's hear it in the comments.
Glass
by Jeff
Image text: I read in this one article that the breaking of electroweak symmetry is the reason we have SOULS. This guy with a degree said so!
First, apologies on this one being late, I’m a bit under the weather, but the internet must go on!
In this comic, Cutie and Cueball are attempting to have Cutie sing at the right note to break the glass. But, instead of breaking, the water in the glass turned to blood. (as an aside, wouldn’t it be easier to break an empty glass? Perhaps I’m over thinking this.)
When Cutie says her thing about physics, the two characters get a reply from what appears to be God since the voice is coming from the top of the comic. God tells the characters in the comic to stop looking for the Higgs Boson. Scientists are looking for the Higgs Boson at CERN which once discovered would help explain the origin of mass in the universe. Indeed, the Higgs Boson is called the “God particle”. Obviously, God would not want man to discover the Higgs Boson because then no one would believe in God. But, if God is real as this comic indicates, then there would be no Higgs Boson since God would have created the universe. Ok, now my brain hurts again.
In the image text, the breaking of electroweak symmetry is (an apologies to physicists out there if I butcher this – please correct me in the comments) what turns massless particles into particles with mass. Essentially creating something out of nothing…
Am I right? Wrong? What do you think? Let's hear it in the comments.