When Sheldon Cooper talks about his work, it’s not just a bunch of scientific sounding words strung together by a Hollywood sitcom writer. Dr. David Saltzberg of UCLA studies high energy particle physics and high-energy neutrino astronomy. He also provides the content for the white boards that show up in Big Bang Theory and writes the scientific dialogue that often includes projects he and colleagues are working on.
Every week, Saltzberg attends the show’s live taping at the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California. He makes sure the whiteboards are correct. For every new episode, they’re covered by a fresh scrawl of formulas dreamed up by Saltzberg and admired by physicists for their scrupulous accuracy—and occasional shout-outs to what’s happening in the world of science.
“The whiteboards have dozens of fans,” Saltzberg jokes.
Saltzberg also reviews scripts in progress. They arrive with unfinished dialogue and brackets reading, “Insert Science Here.” He fills in the blanks, as in an episode where Dr. Sheldon Cooper, a puffed-up theoretical physicist, keeps bumming rides from a neighbor.
The professor has been with the show since 2007. Set designers asked him to show them graduate students’ apartments.
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“And they did a nice, faithful recreation of their apartments,” he said, adding that after CBS tested the show, the sets were scrapped, because, Salzberg thinks, the sets were too depressing.
He is not the only scientist on set. Mayim Bialik plays Dr. Amy Farrah Fowler and has a PhD in neuroscience. She helps Saltzberg polish the sitcom’s scientific details.
Which other shows could use this kind of reality check? Is Gray’s Anatomy still on TV? Everyone complains about the science on that show. Whenever I watch a crime drama – CSI, NCIS, The Following, Criminal Minds (they get more gruesome every year) – I wonder how plausible the physiology and biology concepts are. If the producers are going to show such hideous crimes and terrible violence, they should at least get the science right.
[Image from from Big Bang Theory wiki]
