Gedanken experiment: Levitate a physics sitcom?

Might CBS let physicists help elevate BBT from the level of Seinfeld , a hilarious show about nothing, to the level of All in the Family , a hilarious show about society’s profoundest issues?

During the early Vietnam years, CBS’s Gomer Pyle portrayed a cheerful country-boy Marine and his irascible sergeant at a peaceful stateside base. The sitcom ignored Vietnam. Slightly later, CBS’s MASH engaged war’s horrors, but still provoked laughter, by imagining Marx-brothers-like situations at a ragtag mobile US Army surgical hospital near the Korean War battle front.

Gomer Pyle, like BBT, dispensed trivial fluff to draw high ratings. MASH reflected obliquely on Vietnam. The Washington Post said MASH‘s finale in 1983 ‘drew the largest audience ever to watch a single television program.’

Indispensable physics addresses not fluff but human-caused climate disruption, clean energy at economy-transforming scales, tools for biomedical researchers and medical practitioners, and the future of everything electronic—not to mention fundamental questions about matter itself.

Drawing on not just physics but technoscience generally, I’ll bet physicists could help CBS get even more laughs and an even bigger viewing audience by suggesting BBT script ideas to lift the sitcom from funny fluff to funny substance. But would CBS listen?

Probably not. CBS does employ a physicist, David Saltzberg of UCLA, to ensure verisimilitude in, for example, equations on BBT whiteboards. But as a BBT co-creator told the Washington Post, ‘obviously the science has to be almost irrelevant.’ In BBT, CBS produces fluff to make fast money.

Still, if the two-way engagement model of science outreach beats the deficit model, then this BBT-levitation question offers the national physics community an intriguing and maybe instructive gedanken experiment: How could this physics sitcom evolve from funny fluff to funny substance?

Under the deficit model, scientists continually seek to improve one-way science lectures in hopes of reducing a captive public’s deficit of science information. The theory is that a better-informed public will cough up more cash for research.

At its best, the deficit model looks like the National Academies’ series of ‘Gathering Storm’ reports—accessible, friendly, persuasive advocacy for scientific research and science education. At its worst, the model looks like BBT‘s Sheldon Cooper, a caricature of a socially inept physicist—insensitive, condescending, and counterproductively hypertechnical, even if also lovable in his naive earnestness.

By now everybody in the physics community has surely at least heard of BBT. George Smoot, the physics Nobel laureate, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who seems to be replacing the late Carl Sagan as astronomy’s public face, have both appeared on the show. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, won an Emmy and a Golden Globe this year. CBS now plans to air three more seasons of BBT.

The show makes fast money by exaggerating the nerdiness of Sheldon and three of his friends. The sitcom’s situations involve nonscientists, notably Penny, who began in 2007 as a ditzy, stick-figure blonde.

Penny to Sheldon during a first-season episode: ‘I’m a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know.’

Sheldon: ‘Yes—it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun’s apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.’

Three and a half TV comedy seasons later, Penny and the other characters have become more rounded. Even Sheldon—in fact, especially Sheldon, though still unaware of his own obtuse arrogance—has gathered depth, much as did the bigot Archie Bunker in CBS’s All in the Family.

Archie became a fixture in American memory—and his TV chair a fixture at the Smithsonian—for his struggles with social change. So could Sheldon, not for his struggles with science-driven technological change, but for ours.

Like most actual physicists—including the vast majority who are polite—the fictional Sheldon is a quick study. That this theoretical physicist is also a caricature shows in his method of learning to swim: He consults the internet. That he has studied human-caused climate disruption but remains a caricature shows in his explanation: Because the ice caps are melting, ‘in the future swimming isn’t going to be optional.’

But Sheldon’s casual, incessant, naive rudeness generates enemies. One is Leslie Winkle, a female physicist who taunts him, and who deflates him by correcting his equations. Another is the Sheldon-taunting Wil Wheaton, against whom Sheldon harbors a deep resentment having something to do with science fiction.

What if BBT introduced a climate-denying character to serve as another Sheldon nemesis? In real life, a few prominent physicists like Freeman Dyson, Will Happer, and Robert Austin dispute the climatological consensus that Sheldon would understand in some depth. What if a similar character joined the physics faculty at the Caltech-resembling university where Sheldon works?

Sheldon’s inevitably laugh-inducing ire at such a challenging character would reach beyond the campus. At home, he would pontificate sarcastically, lecturing Penny and others accurately but highly technically. Sensible nonscientist Penny—nowadays a veteran in Sheldon’s realm—would render his snide pomposity laughable simply by translating his jargon for others.

None of this would require BBT to become a science documentary show in the deficit-model, comedy-killing style. It could all be done in engagement-model style, with Penny and other nonscientists part of an incidental two-way exchange.

In fact, consider another idea for BBT storytelling that retains humor, excludes deficit-model-style propagandizing, shifts the show’s fluff-to-substance balance, and potentially helps CBS enlarge BBT‘s audience.

Imagine that Sheldon’s fellow physicist Leonard begins dating an attractive young woman whose nonscientist dad loves to talk science, especially concerning his absolute certitude about his lawsuit alleging that a new supercollider’s startup will destroy the planet.

Like all drama, comedy centers on the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself—as when Leonard, caught between the opposing urges of scientific truth and romantic desire, must calibrate how much of that scientific truth to tell the young woman’s dad.

Back in 2007, this sitcom seemed a science-outreach disaster, with only slapstick resemblances to the physics world that it nevertheless began branding. But it has evolved. The New York Times quoted Johnny Galecki, who plays Leonard, musing that although many people ‘thought it would be a show that poked fun at smart people, it has become a show that defends smart people,’ specifically those ‘molding our future.’

So maybe the show’s owner, CBS, could begin crafting scripts involving technocivic issues that make for comedy-catalyzing, laugh-inducing conflict—and for audience enlargement, in more senses than one.

But maybe CBS prefers the Gomer Pyle level. Maybe the network has no ambition to see Sheldon’s ‘spot’ alongside Archie’s chair someday in the Smithsonian, or to hear Sheldon’s all-purpose exclamation ‘Bazinga!’ permeate American slang. Even then, the physics community could profit by running the gedanken experiment.

Physics Today commentaries, including this one, invite reader comments. Leaving aside one-way, deficit-model science lecturing but embracing the potential of entertainment for science engagement, what BBT script ideas can physicists and friends of physics invent?

I hope you record them here.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the Media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.