Mark Brake - The Science of the Big Bang Theory: What America’s Favorite Sitcom Can Teach You about Physics, Flags, and the Idiosyncrasies of Scientists

Copyright 2019 by Mark Brake

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Daniel Brount

Cover illustration by iStockphoto

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-4149-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-4150-8

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

The Doppler Effect in fashion, and some other interesting ideas in physics clothing

The work of UNOOSA and the history of alien invasion

Imagining the unimaginable: How do we rationally imagine alien life?

The wonderful Indian contribution to mathematics and astronomy

How teleportation in fiction has influenced theorists to dream up ways of teleporting in fact

A history of ancient civilizations through cracks in the Earths crust

Fun with flags as a story about the pursuit of empire, and the conquest of space

The importance of caves for those who dream of traveling into space

Hawking and Cooper, under a night sky, watch stellar evolution unfold in one night

The cosmic origin of the chemical elements on Earth

The Great Oxygenation Event, and the discovery of oxygen gas

A most unusual take on that famous Periodic Table

A potted history of the art of reductio-ad-absurdum, climaxing with Mark Twain

The genius of the ancient world: Archimedes

How farmers, like Pennys family, changed the world

How Coopers, Wolowitzes, and Hofstadters got to America

The hidden history of automata

How Nazi rocket science led to one of the greatest American movies of the twentieth century

The connoisseurs guide to time machines

The polarization of science and church in the days of Galileos telescope

The wonder and mystery of those dark absorption lines and the spectroscope

Engine of human evolution: The discovery of fire

That terrestrial magma machine, the volcano

The rarely told tale of rock music, machines, and science fiction

The preposterous idea of the human as superhero

Aspects of monstrous pseudoscience that simply wont die

The wit and wonder of twentieth-century American physicist, Richard Feynman

Sheldons controversial infatuation with The Doctor

The unlikely history of boffins and babes: Wolfgang Pauli, H. G. Wells, and Robert Hooke

Scientists as strange monsters, with Empedocles, Tesla, and the king of weird, Isaac Newton

Cliched and stereotypical images of scientists, and Sheldon Cooper

SPACE

Welcome to The Science of The Big Bang Theory, the ultimate dissection of televisions favorite sitcom. With over two hundred episodes and a dozen seasons, The Big Bang Theory is a hallmark American television series, and one that not only and unusually places science center stage, but also brings a new class of character to mainstream television: the science nerd.

The show is undeniably popular and influential in shaping public attitudes to science and scientists, and yet there are few books that explore the shows culture and social dimension, and the science that sits behind the script. This book does just that. Its at times a light-hearted, and other times a hard-hitting, science companion to The Big Bang Theory . It looks behind the comedy scenes and scripts of the show to provide you with the kind of dissection of the science and culture youd need to understand math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries, that all started with the big bang! Hey! as they say in the shows theme song.

Like other books in this series ( The Science of Superheroes and The Science of Science Fiction ), this book is split into four sections of space, time, machine, and monster. The topic of space comes up often in episodes of The Big Bang Theory , whether its references to the final frontier of Star Trek , or the character of Spock, or the vast interstellar depths of the cosmos and the legions of fleet and nimble spaceships of Star Wars. The selection of space topics in this first section of the book shows the huge range of science subjects on display, from the fashion implications of physics in the episode The Middle-Earth Paradigm, to the expectation of alien invasion in The Earworm Reverberation.

Some topics are quintessentially space, such as the imagining of alien life implied in The Bat Jar Conjecture episode and the direct reference to particle astrophysics in The Grasshopper Experiment. But for other space topics, we have to dig deeper and think a little more playfully about what we mean by space. The issue of teleportation in The Jerusalem Duality is a unique form of travel through space. Sheldons snobbery about geology in The Geology Methodology is questioned by thinking about the geographical space on our planet and how important the planetary science of geology has been to discovering the truth about the human journey on this Earth.

Finally, we think about historical space. Sheldons famous fun with flags game is featured in, among many other episodes, The Valentino Submergence. Here you could think of the history of many nations on Earth as a story about the pursuit of empire, and the conquest of space. To capture foreign territories in the quest for land, or geographical space, and to claim that glittering prize as your own. Its a conquest of space in a very real way. Sadly, in The Luminous Fish Effect, Sheldon once more shows his ignorance on the topic of geology, so we explore Sheldons contention that theres nothing interesting about caves by taking a look at the importance of the subterranean space of caves for those who dream of traveling to the remote corners of the solar system, and beyond.

THE MIDDLE-EARTH PARADIGM: SHELDON AND PHYSICS FASHIONS

In The Middle-Earth Paradigm, Season 1, Episode 6, Sheldon attempts to wear the Doppler Effect in clothing.

The frequency of a wave-like signalsuch as sound or lightdepends on the movement of the sender and of the receiver. This is known as the Doppler Effect. Some of its manifestations, we know from everyday life, such as a fire engines siren abruptly changing pitch as the engine passes by; others are of interest in astronomy and astrophysics.

Einstein Online , a web portal on Einsteins theories of relativity

In astronomy, that source can be a star that emits electromagnetic waves; from our vantage point, Doppler shifts occur as the star orbits around its own center of mass and moves toward or away from Earth. These wavelength shifts can be seen in the form of subtle changes in its spectrum, the rainbow of colors emitted in light. When a star moves toward us, its wavelengths get compressed, and its spectrum becomes slightly bluer. When the star moves away from us, its spectrum looks slightly redder... The pattern of a stars Doppler shifts can change over time as a result of gravity affecting the stars motion. Recently, [scientists] used the Doppler Effect to detect color shifts in the light absorbed by an exoplanet, which indicated strong winds in the planets atmosphere.