SPACE

Welcome to The Science of The Big Bang Theory, the ultimate dissection of television’s 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 show’s culture and social dimension, and the science that sits behind the script. This book does just that. It’s 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 you’d need to understand “math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries, that all started with the big bang! Hey!” as they say in the show’s 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 it’s 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. Sheldon’s 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. Sheldon’s 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. It’s 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 Sheldon’s contention that there’s 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.