TIME

It’s little wonder that The Big Bang Theory often touches upon the topic of time. Contemporary culture is obsessed with time. We often wonder what would happen if we were able to tamper with time. And there’s no better people to ask, after all, than physicists like Leonard and Sheldon. It may even be possible, for all we know, to jump between different timelines, guide future human evolution, rewrite the past, and even cheat death.

It’s really not that long ago that scientists made incredible discoveries about the true nature of time. Not long after the Pilgrim Fathers were settling in what was to become the eastern part of the United States, scientists back in Europe were beginning to realize that time was limitless, and inhumanly vast in scale. By the time of the American Civil War, the Industrial Revolution was well under way, and great machines began churning over the soil of the world. Dinosaurs were discovered. The death toll of extinction rang out for the first time. The fossil record churned out evidence of creatures no longer to be found on Earth, though some creationists still try to deny it. The new theory of evolution forced humans to confront the terrible extent of time. What if humans too became extinct?

Ever since the Scientific Revolution around five hundred years ago, science has encroached upon all aspects of life. Science has sought not just to explore, but to exploit nature. To master it. And when you think about it, many sciences are truly historical in nature; they investigate time. It’s more obvious with the sciences of geology and archeology; they depend on digging down into the Earth to find clues and evidence about the historical past. But evolutionary biology too is historical in nature; it’s a study of the processes that led to the diversity of life on Earth, all from a single common ancestor. Astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology too investigate time. The work that Raj does at Caltech as an astrophysicist is a case in point. The very act of simply stargazing means that the farther you look out into deep space, the further back in time you peer. And the three topics together form a study of the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe.

Bearing all this in mind, it’s easy enough to take a tangential and playful approach when taking on board the topic of time in The Big Bang Theory. It’s easy enough to see how time works in “The Extract Obliteration,” where we have Sheldon and Stephen Hawking watch an evolution of a star population happen in the course of just one night, rather than over their true time period of ten billion years.

A good number of episodes contain a quirky take on the topic of evolution. The evolution of the particles of matter is skillfully explained in “The Matrimonial Momentum,” while “The Helium Insufficiency” implies the history of chemical gases and “The Romance Resonance” describes the evolution of the chemical elements in the famous periodic table. Elsewhere, it’s plain old history itself that crops up in the show. “The Dumpling Paradox” allows a potted history of reductio-ad-absurdum; “The Bachelor Party Corrosion” features the genius of Archimedes. Penny’s family history in “The Thanksgiving Decoupling” enables us to consider how farming changed the world, and finally, in the episode “The Vengeance Formulation,” we ask how Coopers, Wolowitzes, and Hofstadters got to America in the first place.