The Science of TV's the Big Bang Theory: Explanations Even Penny Would Understand - Softcover

Zobel, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770412174 ISBN 13: 9781770412170

Publisher: ECW Press, 2015

Synopsis

Reveals the hard facts behind the laughter on TV’s most popular sitcom

The highest-rated scripted show on TV, The Big Bang Theory often features Sheldon, Howard, Leonard, and Raj wisecracking about scientific principles as if Penny and the rest of us should know exactly what they’re talking about.

The Science of TV’s The Big Bang Theory lets all of us in on the punchline by breaking down the show’s scientific conversations. From an explanation of why Sheldon would think 73 is the best number, to an experiment involving the physical stature of Wolowitz women, to an argument refuting Sheldon’s assertion that engineers are the Oompa-Loompas of science, author Dave Zobel maintains a humorous and informative approach and gives readers enough knowledge to make them welcome on Sheldon’s couch.

About this title

About the Author

In addition to his seven-year stint as a writer for public radio’s The Loh Down on Science, Dave Zobel has penned segments for the University of Texas at Austin’s StarDate, NPR’s Day to Day, and the game show Says You! A science pundit who’s appeared on G4 and Discovery, Zobel sits on the board of Trash for Teaching, an L.A. not-for-profit that rescues manufacturers’ discards and repurposes them as science and art kits for schools.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Science of TV's the Big Bang Theory

Explanations Even Penny Would Understand

By Dave H. Zobel

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Dave Zobel
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77041-217-0

CHAPTER 1

The Naming of Things

Raj: Sheldon, I want you to meet Neil deGrasse Tyson from the Hayden Planetarium in New York.

Sheldon: I'm quite familiar with Dr. Tyson. He's responsible for the demotion of Pluto from planetary status. [To Dr. Tyson:] I liked Pluto. Ergo, I do not like you.

– "The Apology Insufficiency" (Season 4, Episode 7)

Scientists, right up there with lawyers and loan officers, are widely regarded as inveterate hair-splitters. And they are. They have to be. Science is confusing enough without letting sloppy language make it worse. If you're a scientist, you try to call things precisely what they are:

"Good news — we've successfully detected the Higgs boson!"

"Ah, yes: evidence of a key component of the Standard Model of particle physics, don't you know."

If you're a non-scientist, you try to call things precisely what they are, and then typically you provide an alternative nomenclature, starting with the word "or":

"I saw on the news that they've detected this thingamajig called the Higgs boson ... or something."

"Isn't that, like, evidence of a super-important part of the Standard Model of particle physics ... or whatever?"

Whether using the precise terminology or implying that you may not have it quite right, you're acknowledging the importance of calling things what they are. No one on The Big Bang Theory embodies this rigorous adherence to verbal exactitude more than Sheldon does; as Penny points out, he loves correcting anyone who "says 'who' instead of 'whom' or thinks the Moon is a planet." That's what makes his retort about Pluto so uncharacteristically un-scientist-worthy. If a group of people are going to talk meaningfully about planets, they'd better be in agreement about what a planet actually is — especially if they're scientists. It's nobody's fault (certainly not Dr. Tyson's) that when the word planet was officially redefined, it stopped applying to Pluto.

What is a planet, anyway? Is it just "a big thing that goes around the Sun"? Unfortunately, depending on your definition of "big," that description applies to potentially millions of objects.

Humanity has been down this slippery slope before. In the very early days of astronomy, what people meant by "planet" really was "a big thing that goes around the Sun." For thousands of years, only five or six were known. (There was some disagreement about whether Earth revolved, which Copernicus resolved.)

Then the telescope was invented, and many additional big things that went around the Sun were discovered and named. By the mid-1800s, the number of objects that had been classified as planets had grown to nearly two dozen. Curiously, all the new additions to the list occupied a single region of the Solar System: a ring around the Sun that's now called the asteroid belt. It contains not a few but millions upon millions of tumbling, rolling fragments of rocky space debris, the building blocks of planets. Half its mass is concentrated in four large fragments, yet the largest of these, Ceres, has barely 1% the mass of Earth's moon.

If you glued all the components of the asteroid belt together, they'd make a ball only about a thousand miles across. That's a pretty small ball: it could comfortably squat on the entire Middle East (not that we would ever wish that) without overhanging the edges. Or if you could somehow spread it like cream cheese, you could just about fil

Edition details

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1770412174
• ISBN 13: 9781770412170
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 424