Science Is Coming

Numerous people have encouraged me to watch The Big Bang Theory over the years, but since I don't have access to current TV shows I never got around to checking it out.  Then while traveling a couple of weeks ago I watched a bunch of syndicated episodes on the motel room TV.  (This was also how I got into The Golden Girls a few years ago.) They were entertaining enough that when I came back home I got the first-season DVDs from the public library, and I just finished watching the second season.  Eventually I expect I'll go through the whole set.

So, The Big Bang Theory is fun; it's a standard situation comedy, well-written and excellently cast.  It's built around four scientists -- or three scientists and an engineer if you're a purist, as they are -- based in a university near Los Angeles, plus a pretty blonde, young actress/waitress, newly arrived in LA from Nebraska at the beginning of Season One, who lives across the hall from two of them.  That the protagonists were scientists excited the show's fans, who celebrated the arrival of media representation for Sciento-Americans on a major network.  A physics professor was enlisted by the show's creators to fill in jargon for a veneer of authenticity.  According to an interview with him featured in the Season Two DVDs, the writers would write the script, with "[Science coming]" at key moments for him to fill in.

Not all the nerdiness is science, though.  The program is peppered with references to videogames, Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books and their spinoff media, paintball, and other such cultural artifacts.  Without these elements I think the show would have had less mass appeal.  But it works, and it ran for thirteen years.  Looking at the full cast listing from IMDB, I see that a lot of nerd magnets had cameos, from George Takei, William Shatner, Carrie Fisher and James Earl Jones to Bill Nye, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Buzz Aldrin.  And more.

So, is this representation?  I haven't hung around with enough scientists to say.  What I see is that the characters are a collection of stereotypes, which is to be expected in a comedy, but I'm intrigued that scientists and nerds evidently embraced their depiction as stereotypes, even caricatures: Sheldon the former child prodigy and Spock imitator from Texas, probably on the Spectrum; Howard the Jewish horndog engineer who lives with his mother and has a peanut allergy; Rajesh the Hindu who can only talk to women when he's drunk and must fend off his parents' nagging to get married; Leonard, Sheldon's lactose intolerant roommate but still kinda Everyman, who has more romantic success than his buddies but lusts hopelessly after Penny.  

Compare Will and Grace, another landmark of minority representation on network television.  Most of the gay men I know professed to hate it, mainly because of the flaming, flighty Jack, and it was widely attacked for its use of stereotypes.  That I recognized the justice of these complaints didn't keep me from enjoying the show.  The Big Bang Theory surprised me by its use not only of nerd stereotypes, but of ethnic ones.  I thought Political Correctness and Cancel Culture had destroyed comedy?

To me the guys in The Big Bang Theory seem to be normal TV sitcom guys, with their scientific pursuits and nerdy cultural consumption mere superficial details; they could be on Friends or Seinfeld, for example.  Their incomprehension and frustration with women is standard, as is their assumption that ordinary shlubs like them have the right to date and sleep with the hottest women.  (One variation I like is that Kunal Nayyar is not only the best-looking of the bunch but, when he has a couple of drinks and is able to talk to them, the most successful with women until the alcohol wears off.  Sheldon's hot sister Missy, for example, rebuffs Howard and Leonard but is very interested in Raj and frustrated when his voice cuts out in mid-encounter.  The actress Summer Glau also responds to him warmly in her cameo, but is also frustrated.  I'll be interested to see how this pattern continues as I watch more of the series.)

I've said before, in connection with Will and Grace, that great comedy characters like Jack or Karen Walker, or Sheldon and Howard, aren't supposed to be role models or positive images.  Just because they're fun to watch on the screen doesn't mean that you'd want to spend much time with them in real life.  For that matter a real live physicist, George Smoot, has a tiny scene putting Sheldon down in one episode of Season Two; he's terrible, even for a non-actor.  (I wonder how many takes they needed?)  Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, is a marvelous physical comic, exemplified by a scene in which Sheldon realizes he owes Penny a hug and delivers it with hilarious and yet touching pathos.  It's not reality, it's writing and acting.

Ooey Gooey Was a Worm, a Mighty Worm Was He!

I want to go back for a moment to something I quoted from Neil DeGrasse Tyson a few days ago:

If you are one of those people who don't like thinking about astronomy because it makes them feel small, Tyson suggests looking at it a different way ... If you "see the universe as something you participate in — as this great unfolding of a cosmic story — that, I think should make you feel large, not small. ... Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up in the universe; we feel large."

How many people don't like thinking about astronomy because it makes them feel small?  What does it have to do with science?  As I indicated yesterday, scientists are apt to brag that science is supposed to make us feel small, because religion supposedly makes us feel big -- but much of religion is devoted to quashing pride and reminding us of our smallness and insignificance before the Deity.  (Except when we make him mad -- then we're not so insignificant after all: our sinfulness puts all Heaven in a rage.)

Besides, if you feel large when you look up at the universe, something is wrong, because you are small, whether you're an astrophysicist or a pastry cook.  Tyson is saying that doing astrophysics fosters delusions of grandeur, which if true would discredit astrophysics, rather than recommend it.  Anyway, isn't science supposed to be about Finding the Truth and not about feeling big or small?

I've mentioned before the feminist historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller and her book Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death (Routledge, 1992).  Here's another bit from it that interested me, drawn from

the real lives of those contemporary scientists who got their start as boy scientists, producing explosives in their kitchens, bathrooms, or, if they were lucky, in a hand-fashioned basement laboratory.  (A generation ago, a common sideline of these basement laboratories used to be the production of “stink bombs” – ready to be set off by the young scientist whenever crossed by an uncooperative or angry mother.)  We are all familiar with the preoccupation many boys have with explosives, and with the great affective investment some of them show in producing bigger and more spectacular explosions – often indeed, continuing beyond boyhood into student days – but perhaps those of us who have spent time around places like MIT and Cal Tech are especially familiar with such behavioral/developmental patterns.  We would probably even agree that these patterns are more common in the early life histories of scientists and engineers than they are in the population at large.  Certainly, for the great majority of the scientists and engineers who started out life as play bomb experts, the energy invested in such primitive attempts at the resolution of early conflicts has been displaced onto mature creative endeavors that leave no trace of their precursors.  But in some cases, such traces are evident, even conspicuous.  As the result of a handy convergence between personal, affective interests and public, political, and economic interests, a significant number of these young men actually end up working in weapons labs (just how many would be interesting to document) – employing their creative talents to build bigger and better (real rather than play) bombs.  In other cases, traces of earlier preoccupations may be evoked only by particular circumstances – for example, the collective endeavor of a Manhattan Project.  The differences between these adult activities and their childhood precursors are of course enormous.  Yet it seems to me that the affective and symbolic continuity between the two nonetheless warrants our attention [49-50].

Just parenthetically, Keller reports that at Los Alamos, a successful bomb, a "bomb with 'thrust' [was] identified as a boy baby, while a girl baby [was] clearly identified as a dud" (50).

Anyway, this passage reminded me that even a sissy like me was fascinated by explosions when I was young.  I never built a basement lab to cook up my own explosives, but I loved cap pistols and fireworks.  Keller allows that many, perhaps most such boys outgrow their early fascination with things that go boom for "mature creative endeavors," though some move on "to build bigger and better (real rather than play) bombs."  I'm sure I recall a later passage in the book where, I thought, Keller mentioned that at Los Alamos, the physicists would relax on weekends by going into the desert to play with conventional explosives, but I can't find it now.  Looking around online, though, I found this more recent story:

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico accidentally blew up a building on December 16 with a Civil War-style cannon. According to an occurrence report [pdf], which was first reported by the Project on Government Oversight, the lab's Shock and Detonation Physics team was testing a large-bore powder gun when they heard a "loud unusual noise."

About 20 minutes later, the researchers ventured out of their bunker to see what had happened. Upon further investigation of the facility’s Technical Area 15, the team discovered that Building 562 had been blown apart. Two doors were "propelled off the structure" and concrete shielding blocks were blasted off the walls. Parts of the cannon were also found lying on the asphalt nearby. The Facility Operations Director declared a "management concern" regarding the explosion. No-one was hurt, but sources told POGO that damages could cost $3 million. The lab reported that it has conducted a "critique" of the incident.

The reports give the impression that these "accidents" -- there are evidently quite a few of them -- occurred during regular research, but why would scientists at Los Alamos be working with, "testing", a "large bore powder gun"?  I suspect that they were just playing around and that a "loud unusual noise" was the aim of the exercise, not an accidental or unwanted side effect. Well, boys will be boys, eh?

The probability that many scientists were driven by a desire to make big booms and big stinks before they started seeking Truth doesn't in itself discredit science, but it does undermine scientists' pretensions to being above the irrationality of the stupid masses.  While I was working on this post I stepped into my local video emporium and saw that Neal DeGrasse Tyson's remake of Cosmos was playing.  Coincidentally (or was it?) I walked in on the segment on the Big Bang Theory that he'd told NPR about.  Tyson spoke slowly and sententiously, his big liquid eyes as full of staged sincerity as any televangelist's -- but then, that's what he is, a tv preacher bringing us the Good News according to Hawking and Darwin.  And his god (created, like all gods, in his own image) is a kid cooking up a Big Bang in the basement, so that he'll feel big.