CONTENTS

Space

The Middle-Earth Paradigm: Sheldon and Physics Fashions

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

The Earworm Reverberation: An Expectation of Extraterrestrials

The work of UNOOSA and the history of alien invasion

The Bat Jar Conjecture and Aliens: Imagining the Unimaginable

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

The Grasshopper Experiment: The Indira Gandhi of Particle Astrophysics with a Penis

The wonderful Indian contribution to mathematics and astronomy

The Jerusalem Duality and the Problem with Teleportation

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

The Geology Methodology: The Cracks That Lead to Civilization

A history of ancient civilizations through cracks in the Earth’s crust

The Valentino Submergence: Fun with Flags

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

The Luminous Fish Effect: Sheldon Is Wrong about Caves

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

Time

The Extract Obliteration: A Hawking-Cooper Radiation

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

The Matrimonial Momentum and the Evolution of Particles

The cosmic origin of the chemical elements on Earth

The Helium Insufficiency: Life’s a Gas

The Great Oxygenation Event, and the discovery of oxygen gas

The Romance Resonance: Fun with Flags and Elements

A most unusual take on that famous Periodic Table

The Dumpling Paradox: Reductio-ad-absurdum

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

The Bachelor Party Corrosion and Archimedes

The genius of the ancient world: Archimedes

The Thanksgiving Decoupling: Fun with Farms

How farmers, like Penny’s family, changed the world

The Vengeance Formulation and the Genetic Line

How Coopers, Wolowitzes, and Hofstadters got to America

Machine

The Fuzzyboots Corollary: Sheldon and Automata

The hidden history of automata

The Porkchop Indeterminacy and Rocket Science

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

The Nerdvana Annihilation and Time Machines

The connoisseur’s guide to time machines

The Cooper-Hofstadter Galileo-Pope Polarization

The polarization of science and church in the days of Galileo’s telescope

The Mystery Date Observation, Revisited: The Joys of Atomic Spectroscopy

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

The Big Bear Precipitation: Fun with Fire

Engine of human evolution: The discovery of fire

The Love Spell Potential: The Biggest Bangs in History

That terrestrial magma machine, the volcano

The 2003 Approximation and Filk Music!

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

Monster

The Hamburger Postulate: Twilight of the Superheroes

The preposterous idea of the human as superhero

The Peanut Reaction and Pseudoscience

Aspects of monstrous pseudoscience that simply won’t die

The Bachelor Party Corrosion and Richard Feynman: Smarter than Sheldon Cooper

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

The Dumpling Decoupling: Sheldon and Doctor Who

Sheldon’s controversial infatuation with The Doctor

The Mystery Date Observation: The Unlikely Dating Habits of Eggheads

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

The Earworm Reverberation, Revisited: The Idiosyncrasies of Scientists

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

The Einstein Approximation: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous Sheldon

Cliched and stereotypical images of scientists, and Sheldon Cooper