Also read The Big Bang Theory's Showrunner Talks Science

Steve Mirsky:    Welcome to Scientific American's Science Talk podcast posted on March 12, 2015.  I'm Steve Mirsky, and that was a clip from the February 26th episode of The Big Bang Theory titled "The Intimacy Acceleration".  Some of the characters are going to an attraction called an Escape Room where they have to use clues to find the key to get out of the room in which the late Dr. Saltzberg has turned into a zombie.

In real life, David Saltzberg is very much alive.  The show was having a little inside joke using his name.  He's a UCLA physicist and the sitcom's science advisor.  Scientific American is prominently featured on tonight's new episode of The Big Bang Theory.  You can read a new Q&A by Rebecca Harrington with Big Bang showrunner Steven Molaro on our website, and I also thought it was a good time to whip out an edited version of an unaired recording of the real David Saltzberg from way back in 2010.  He gave a talk titled "The Making of The Big Bang Theory: TV Comedy Plus Accurate Science" at the Communicating Science to the Public through the Performing Arts conference held at the City University of New York's Graduate Center.  The audio quality is a bit dicey, but it should be intelligible as long as you're not listening on the subway or while watching The Big Bang Theory re-runs.  It gets better about three and a half minutes in.  Without any further ado, here's the very-not-late Dr. David Saltzberg.

David Saltzberg:         I've been involved with the show since the beginning.  There was actually a pilot in 2006.  A pilot is what an engineer would call a prototype.  They put the show together to see what works.  They gave it to focus groups, and _______.  Often, that's the end of the show, but they gave the show another chance with a second pilot, and that did work, and that's the first episode of our first season, was that pilot.  Actually, no one has ever seen the first pilot.  That brings up something which is kind of interesting that I had never realized, is that comedy is experimental science.  It's a science that's been going on for thousands of years, there's a lot of rules the writers know.  If I ever try to suggest something, there's a reason that it won't work, you know, "Well, if you mention that twice, you'll have to mention it a third time," or, "That starts with the wrong letter," and an unbelievable amount of knowledge going back to the ancient Greeks about what works in comedy and what doesn't.

In the end, either the audience laughs or it doesn't, so they really experiment.  When the show is taped, it's taped in front of a live studio audience; if the joke doesn't work, they'll re-write it on the spot.  In that sense, it's a bit like Vaudeville.  In the old days, they would put on the show every night based on what worked when they changed the jokes.  I think, to some extent, sitcoms on television are direct descendants of Vaudeville.  People used to write for Vaudeville, then went to radio, radio plays, comedies, and then those people moved to television.  Let me tell you a little bit about what I do in the show.

One thing is I talk to the writers and the showrunners.  The people that run the shows in television tend to be the writers, which is a bit different than film where the director has most of the creative control.  The writers for the show, for those of you that are familiar with experimental physics, a showrunner is a PI, or principal investigator.  They have sort of all the final responsibility.  The writers, they come to UCLA, they've met students and post-docs, visited labs.  Every once in a while, I'll see something that happened during their visit.  For example, they're thinking about doing a scene, something I didn't think was funny but, apparently, is funny, is that when our astronomers at UCLA observe using the Keck telescope, which is a fantastic telescope in Hawaii at Mauna Kea, they don't actually go.  They just go across the hall to an observing room, pick up the phone, and they look at computer screens and talk to the people that are running the telescope.  It seems perfectly normal to me, but the writers thought that was really funny.

[Laughter]

That's an example of something which they picked up.  Another thing, no lab coats.  Physicists don't wear lab coats, and that was one of the things that when Chuck Lorre returned back from his visit, he told costumes people, "No lab coats.  I didn't see any lab coats, and not every lab is shiny and new."  The actors came once, also, to visit UCLA and met the students, and so forth.  We had lunch.  In general, I go to each taping.  By the time the show has been taped, there actually isn't much for me to do.  They almost never ask me any questions.  Mostly, we're sort of just chatting about what might happen in some upcoming show.  I talk to people in the sets and the costumes department just to make things look realistic _______ _______.  _____ ______ funny.  A set designer visited several students' apartments for the first pilot.  She made it very realistic.  One of the reasons that pilot wasn't accepted because it was too gloomy and depressing.

[Laughter]

One of the things that I do is I get these scripts here, and this is what a script looks like.  I wish I could have submitted papers in college that looked like this, with these huge margins, double-spaced.  I could have been done in no time.  Anyway, you can see Leonard says, "I just got home.  I was up all night using the – scientific equipment to come – for my – science to come – experiment," so this is an example of the kind of thing that I get to fill in.  Sometimes they fill it in themselves, sometimes I fill it in, and that's a case where I like to put something in that's actually realistic that's going on in science right now, so some discussion of dark matter experiments using liquid xenon.  The real hope is that somebody will just Google what's going on.

We have about 15 million viewers each episode, and it's not the same 15 million viewers each episode.  I could go out and give public lectures on science with 100 people in them every week for 100,000 weeks to get to 10 million people.  Did I get that right?  So, you know, this is brief, but it's a huge audience, and people do watch television with their laptops around.  Hopefully, they will Google something and that may be a chance to get the idea of dark matter out there, especially if they're working on it week after week, and people do care about the characters, there's a pretty good chance people are Googling what's going on.  What else do I do?  Depending on the episode, sometimes they'll be working on something more scientific and I'll get the script about a month in advance, and they'll really want to know something.  For example, Sheldon has marbles scattered on the floor.  Why?  So, we came up with a scientific idea involving a planar material called graphene that he was working on.

Then, things really go fast during taping week, so the actors see the script for the first time six days before staging.  They run through it every day in front of the writers, and the writers modify it, and so I get a copy of the script every night, and sometimes they add some science, so they want to make sure that nothing wrong has crept in but, at that point, things can't be changed too much.  It's filmed _______ live studio audience.  It's not a laugh track that you're hearing.  It takes about three hours to make a 22-minute show.  _______ runs very efficient.  There's about 150 people running around, very professional, doing this work.  There is last-minute changes, for example, if there's a pronunciation question, but it doesn't really ever happen.  I have grad students sometimes come with me.  There's a taping called the Geek of the Week ______.  Another thing that's actually very common for science advisors to have to do is media, so EPK stands for electronic press kit, and that's not something they love doing.  It means a camera is on you, which is pretty tough.  For example, one of the DVD extras in Season 2 was about the science behind the show and the making of The Big Bang Theory.  I really do like the show and want to help it out, so I do that, but I would prefer not to be on camera.

What don't I do?  Okay, I'll make it really clear.  I don't invent characters or develop them.  I really can't.  I don't make stories, I don't write dialogue, and I certainly don't make jokes.  I tried at the beginning, you know, not really knowing _______ thinking, "I can tell a joke," you know, sometimes I would give them some jokes.  If you're a physicist, sometimes you go to parties and cocktail parties, you're just chatting with people, and someone will tell you their new theory of gravity and you're kind of like, "Hmmm."  You're sort of holding your lip, "I want this person to stop talking to me."  Well, that's sort of the look they gave me when I tried to give them my jokes, so I quickly stopped trying to do that.  So, I think my role is more indirect, having the actors and the writers visit the labs, talking to them about stories.  Usually, it's something I don't think is interesting at all that they pick up on and go, "That's really funny."

The writers do meet other scientists through me.  I try to bring someone new around all the time, and they usually mine that person for information and stories, and so forth.  Is there anything that could be learned from my experience there?  It turns out I'm not unique.  Actually, scientific consultants go back probably as old as film, just about.  For example, here's a study done by David Kirby from interviewing about 50 science consultants in film and television.  He categorized their ideas, and it could be anything from my experience, where I'm woven into the process from the very beginning, just chatting about story ideas, all the way through final, getting exact dialogue, discussing with the set decorators how things should be done.

I have a friend who is a science consultant on a drama, and they're so secretive they will only send him one or two pages of script, so he can't even help them with other things, and it's filmed off in another country to save money, so he never even goes to the set.  So, you have a wide range of experiences, but some things are kind of the same, like no matter how much they use you or don't use you on set or for the story, they will use the science consultant for media relations to give the stamp of approval, for example.  Really, if you want to be a science consultant for a show, you better like the show because you're going to wind up standing up and defending it _______.

Here's another kind of paper from different authors, "Cinema as a Tool for Science Literacy."  We're gonna talk a little bit about that, just getting a little bit of science out there which is correct, or at least getting the words out there and having people look it up on their own is something we can hope to do.  We just don't get these kind of numbers anywhere else.  Even on a television documentary on science, you're not getting these numbers.  If we want to reach out to the rest of our citizens in our country, we have to go to where they are, and so film and television is where they are.  There's a whole list of – you can just see that lots of people are writing on this topic, it's a big social science field: Cinema as a Tool for Science Literacy; The Impact of Science Fiction on Film; _______ Student Understanding of Science; Real Reality: Science Consultants in Hollywood, and so forth.  Understanding, from cataloging what kind of interaction, what does Hollywood science look like, to what is its impact on culture and on people watching it.

As I said, there's about 15 million viewers each week and not the same each week, and it's skewed young.  Don't forget there's re-runs, as well, and then there's _______ include international viewers here, so it's a mindboggling number.  Probably in the end, it's over 100 million people see the show.  The freshman physics is correct and understandable, and the modern physics is real modern physics and really cutting-edge, so we had graphene in there probably before any other show had ever mentioned graphene.  Something to give you a little hint, one of the things I really like is the search for extra solar planets, and I've also not seen that anywhere in popular fiction yet, so we try to get out ahead of people there.

One of the things I was worried about in the beginning was was this going to portray scientists in some sort of mean-spirited light?  I think we all have that concern: it would either be too stereotypical or somehow mean.  But, I realize now looking back that this was not really something to be concerned about because the sitcom is a highly defined art form, and the ensemble really is like a family.  You have to like the characters.  Even the ones that are seriously flawed, you have to like the characters or people won't tune back in.  That's why, ultimately, these are really loveable characters, and I run across undergrads at my university all the time who just love Sheldon, who is the most difficult person you could imagine.  You couldn't live with him for 15 minutes, but somehow he's portrayed in a way that's really empathetic, and people love him.

As far as bringing the news, mid Season 3, Sheldon had a problem, and the important part was the following: he had marbles on the floor, and people came in and tripped.  You know, it's comedy.  That's all the truth you need to know.  But, they wanted to add why was he doing it?  Well, graphene is the hottest new material in condensed matter physics.  I hear it just won the Nobel Prize this month.  There were more talks about graphene than any other material, by far, at the American ________ Meeting.  _____ I don't think very many people in the public have heard about graphene, which is basically a chicken wire of carbon atoms, so that's what we had him doing.

He was on the floor trying to understand a problem with graphene.  There are teachable moments here, when graphene is mentioned or dark matter, so I have a little blog called The Big Blog Theory.  They mentioned pulsars in one episode, and I talk about Jocelyn Bell, who discovered pulsars.  Sometimes, we have the back story explaining science that might not have been obvious because sometimes they don't want to give a long description about science, believe it or not, so I get to explain it in the blog.

Finally, I'll just conclude with a letter that we got from Robyn Asimov, who is the daughter of Isaac Asimov, who is the hero of the writers and one of my heroes.  She said, "The Big Bang Theory is delightfully witty, a brilliant mix of intelligent dialogue with comedy, and absolutely spot-on regarding the wonderful, cerebrally sexy world of nerds.  Discussing my father's," Isaac's – "three laws of robotics during an hysterical conversation among three of the cast members, theorizing that one was a robot and would he want to be told, was priceless.  Cheers to the show for making geeks truly loveable, as loveable as I found my father to be."  So, they were really happy to see that.  Now, ________.

[Applause]

Male:         We'll take some questions now.  There's a microphone over there, so if you want to leave a question, please line up behind that microphone on the left.

Male:         Sheldon works on string theory, and I'm a physicist, and why is he suddenly working in condensed matter physics?

[Laughter]

It just didn't add up with his character.

Saltzberg: Well, it's really funny because when I was giving this talk in March at the Condensed Matter Meeting for American Physical Society and said, "Why can't those guys work on more condensed matter?"  Well, the thing is that graphene has a very interesting structure, a hexagonal structure, and it turns out that the electrons in graphene behave not according to the normal equation, the _______ equation that we're used to in materials but the relativistic version, which is the Dirac equation.  Interesting things happen.  A friend of mine is working on the properties that we don't understand, like spinning, which is the fundamental angular momentum that all particles have.  It's not knowing where this comes from in a physical theory, yet spin comes out in graphene, so my friend, in doing some theoretical work, wonders if space time might have a hexagonal structure just like graphene, and so there is this crossover in the end.  There is a connection.  That's how I can imagine why Sheldon was working on it.