The Man Who Gets The Science Right On 'The Big Bang Theory'
Sure, Bob Newhart may have won his first Emmy for guest-starring as "Professor Proton" on the hugely popular show The Big Bang Theory, about four young scientists at Cal-Tech. But behind the scenes is a real-life professor, Dr. David Saltzberg, of UCLA.
Saltzberg studies high energy particle physics and high-energy neutrino astronomy, using radio detection techniques... when he's not working as The Big Bang Theory's science consultant.
"It's just like a physics lab!" Saltzberg exclaims as he maneuvers around the show's sprawling set. "You have to watch where you walk. There are cables and everything everywhere."
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.
"She couldn't understand why Sheldon never got a driver's license," Saltzberg explains. When she asks what Sheldon was doing at age 16, when everyone else was learning to drive, he answers, as per Saltzberg, "Examining perturbative amplitudes in n=4 supersymmetric theories, leading to a reexamination of the ultraviolet properties of multi-loop n=8 supergravity, using modern twistor theory."
Which is, as it happens, "a real, important project that one of my friends is working on."
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