A pair of popstars named Justin famously called on their spurned lovers to "cry me a river" - but it's unlikely that either Timberlake or Bieber expected the ladies to follow through on their orders.
Now British students have released the results of a light-hearted probe into whether it's actually possible to sob enough tears to fill a large waterway.
Leah Ashley and Robbie Roe, who are studying at the University of Leicester's department of natural sciences, "examined the plausibility of people around the world crying enough tears to create a river" by analysing the Roe River, in Montana.
This is considered to be the shortest river in the world and is just 61 metres in length.
Sadly, the whole of the world's population couldn't actually cry enough to fill this stream, even if they were "feeling particularly crestfallen".
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The Roe River (pictured above) pumps out roughly 709,190,040 litres a day, meaning that if every human got together for a good old sob, they'd still not be able to cry enough tears to fill even the shortest of rivers.
"While copious blubbering may not be able to create a river, it could fill an Olympic size swimming pool," the university said in a statement.
The volume of a human tear is 6.2 micro litres, meaning that our species could collectively weep 2,500,000 litres - enough to fill a pool and "an amount possibly produced by Justin Timberlake on a daily basis when reflecting on his origins as a member of NSYNC," according to the jokers at the University of Leicester.
The students' findings were published in the J ournal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics , which is run by Leicester University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Science.
Dr Cheryl Hurkett, who works in this department, said: "I am always pleased to see my students engaging so enthusiastically with the subject. I encourage them to be as creative as possible with their subject choices as long as they can back it up with hard scientific facts, theories and calculations.”