StarTalk Radio - Inside The Big Bang Theory, with Simon Helberg and Bill Prady

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

Dive into The Big Bang Theory – the hit TV show and the beginning of the universe – with Neil deGrasse Tyson, TBBT co-creator Bill Prady, TBBT actor Simon Helberg, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and astrophysicists Charles Liu and Janna Levin.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/inside-the-big-bang-theory-with-simon-helberg-and-bill-prady/Photo Credit: Brandon Royal Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. Welcome to StarCult. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. The HIT TV show portrays scientists as its main characters, but also the giant explosion that gave birth to the universe. So, let's do this. Comedic co-host tonight, Jack Nice. My man.

How are you, buddy? Always my man. Always good to see you. And joining us is my friend and fellow astrophysicist and StarTalk's resident geek-in-chief, Charles Liu. Yeah! All right. He's a professor at the City University of New York

on Staten Island. And you're a fountain of knowledge of all things science and pop culture. That is true. If you don't believe me, you watch. So we'll be tapping your geek-spertise tonight

as we discuss the portrayal of science and scientists in the hit TV sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. So, of course, in science, Big Bang Theory describes the origin of the universe. Yes. On TV, Big Bang Theory follows a group of sort of nerdy scientists, and it draws its humor from the science of the universe itself.

So we have a clip from the show to demonstrate this fact. Check it out. How would you determine the ground state of a quantum system with no exact solution? I would guess a wave function and then vary its parameters until I found the lowest energy solution. Do you know how to integrate x squared times e to the minus x without looking it up? I'd use Feynman's trick. Different differentiate under the integral sign. Yeah. Okay. Charles. Yes.

Did you ever in your life imagine that you would hear the phrase, differentiate under the integral sign, as the punchline in a sitcom? I figure sooner or later some talented comedy writer would figure it out. No, you're lying. No, no, no, that's true. Let me say this, okay, that show clearly showed its Southern California bias because very few people outside of Caltech call that Feynman's trick.

It's usually called Leibniz's rule. Almost everyone in the universe, well, on Earth, almost everyone on Earth uses it, calls it Leibniz's rule, but there it was like, I'd use Feynman's trick. Yeah. Nah. I love geek humor.

So the main characters of the Big Bang Theory include two physicists, an astrophysicist, a neuroscientist, a microbiologist, and an aerospace engineer. These are the main characters. Sounds like a party. and an aerospace engineer. These are the main characters. Sounds like a party. Well, the character who is trying to prove

his scientific worthiness in that clip as an aerospace engineer, his character, he's played by Simon Helberg. So I nabbed Simon for a StarTalk interview when I was last out in L.A. Right. It was cool. And so I asked him about his own scientific roots. Let's check it out. Do you have any geeky memories as a kid? when I was last out in LA. Right. It was cool. And so I asked him about his own scientific roots.

So let's check it out. Do you have any geeky memories as a kid? Science teachers you either loved or hated? Or were you picked on? Were you bullied? Well, those are separate. Not by science teachers, if that's what you're asking. They always were pretty nice to me. But I, yeah.

There are some bullying teachers occasionally. Yes, that's true. I had a good, the science teachers were always the cool ones. Like we had one that was like definitely a hippie and had a ponytail despite not having a lot of hair. And which is maybe that's a science thing. I don't know how he did that. It's the last gasp. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then he. It's better than a comb over when you don't have a lot of hair. That's true. Well, yeah, he had to be kind of, he had to be cool. So ponytail despite...

No, I was impressed by science immediately. And then he let us do open book tests, which I thought was... Revolutionary in the day, maybe? It was revolutionary. They were always the ones that did a little outside the box. I had another... In seventh grade, a really cool science teacher.

So I was very interested in science right off the bat. The cool thing was he was talking about ponytails and comb-overs and that whole deal, which brings me to a... It scares me when you pull out your little three-by-five card. Because I realize that science hair is a thing. It's a thing. Science hair is something. Charles. Yes. Do you have, you teach. Yes. Do you have any quirky teaching styles? I use.

Open book tests. I give open internet tests. Really? What is the point of higher education today? It's so that you can be better than a search engine, better than the app on your phone. Otherwise, who would want you to be part of their team? So they get anybody to run the search engine or an app. than the app on your phone. Otherwise, who would want you to be part of their team? So they get anybody to run the search engine or an app.

So I'm not going to tell someone, hey, tell me on a test, regurgitate a fact like the diameter of a planet Jupiter, okay? I'm not going to do that because you can just look that up. Instead, I'm going to tell you, here's a planet. Here's a certain size of planet. Tell me what you think the center is made of. Tell me what you think how much of it is atmosphere, and tell me why. As Abraham Lincoln said, never memorize anything you can look up on the internet. Well, it's 100% true. So create a TV show about...

You got me. You got me. If you create a TV show about science nerds, you probably should have some science geek street cred yourself. Okay? So not only had I interviewed Simon Helberg, I sat down with co-creator of the Big Bang Theory, Bill Prady. And I asked him about the origin of the show. Let's check it out. You know, Big Bang starts with Chuck Lorre, who I created the show with, and we began talking about people that I knew in my previous career in computer software. And I was a programmer in the early days of microcomputers,

and we started talking about those people, and Chuck felt that he hadn't seen people like that on television. And I agreed because the, for lack of a better word, the nerd, you know, kind of character was portrayed in a very homogenized way. And I knew from being in that world that this was, you know, that this was, you know, this was Darwin's finches. There's a lot of different kinds of nerds and geeks and, you know, and all of that. And it's, in fact, it's a rich kind of community.

It's a much more tolerant. In fact, if it weren't rich, you couldn't write 10 years of stories. Sure, sure. But I knew this from living in the world. And people who are, for lack of a better way of saying it, wired a little differently, whose outlook on the world is a little different. So when we were talking about characters like that

and that they weren't depicted on television, and we really wanted to get back to a world of sort of pure intellectual exploration, and we started talking about what are those fields. And Chuck and I are both science nerds. And at that point, it was very clear that we'd found exactly what we were looking for in terms of a profession for the characters.

Bill, do you realize that if you Google Big Bang Theory, your show comes up first and the creation of the universe comes up second? I like that. Well, so I also have to ask Bill Prady, how does he make sure every episode that he gets the science right? The writers get the science right because they know that if they're trying to put on a science show and they get some of the facts wrong, that we would call their stuff out. They know this. And so let's see how they deal with this challenge. Check it out. We are the only television show, we think in history, that employs a physicist on staff. So Dr. David Salzberg of UCLA is our consulting physicist.

And he is there. So he writes the equations on the background. He writes the equations on the board. But more than that, he will help us. You know, whether sometimes it's a small piece of dialogue and we're just going to say, you know, Sheldon had a bad day at work and what's he complaining about? But sometimes he'll work and we'll really integrate something into a story because we want to say, well, what are the guys working on at work now? What's happening? And Sheldon was working on a graphene problem.

A new form of carbon. A new form. Even, I think, was awarded a Nobel Prize for its discovery. It was later that year. It's carbon in a plane, a flat plane of carbon. A new form. Even, I think, was awarded a Nobel Prize for its discovery. It was later that year. It's carbon in a plane, a flat plane of carbon, yeah. Right. It has all kinds of its own properties to it, yeah. It has different properties from other arrangements of carbon atoms, and it winds up being very useful for things. And two scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize,

and in their Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, they played a clip from the Big Bang Theory with Sheldon working on the graphene problem. But this goes back to a thing that we talked about when we started doing Big Bang Theory, which is if we're going to give them a job, let's have them do the job right. And let's have it be that if somebody is familiar with what they're doing, that we're not going to get it perfect, but let's see, the threshold was scientists shouldn't throw their shoes at the television. Ah.

Up next, we'll check out my own little cameo appearance on the Big Bang Theory when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City. We're talking about the TV show The Big Bang Theory. And I asked Big Bang Theory star Simon Helberg if he was surprised that a sitcom about scientists would actually work. Let's check it out. When you audition for the show and you see the first few scripts, are you saying, okay, this will flop. No one is going to get this. Who cares about scientists?

No, I think that, I think I, no, I did not think. This is way back in 07 now. This is, yeah. No, I didn't think that the show would flop. But by this point, I actually had gotten to a very sort of zen place with it, where I didn't think much about it. I just assumed, I just took it as that. It was your next gig.

I just said, I'll do the pilot, and I will be able to do another pilot, if this pilot doesn't, because that was kind of how I lived, was pilot to pilot, failed pilot to failed pilot. But at this point, I thought, eh, this is, it's a very, very good script and I will just commit to this week of work. And then when we shot it,

that was the moment that I realized, oh, this audience is, something kind of spectacular is happening here where the hardest thing about shooting a pilot is nobody knows these characters and nobody knows the world and generally to set up characters in a in a world you need more than 22 minutes it's really really hard to do and and if you if you don't and the world is the world created in the show yeah the universe of the show exactly not yes and if you can do if you can do it in 22 minutes, usually you don't get to the joke

until the last minute because you have to set it up for so long. So it's not funny usually either. And somehow they were with us again from the moment we started. They understood who these characters were. And when I entered and Kunal and I entered into it, literally knocking on the door, the audience applauded us. And it didn't even make sense. They didn't know who we were. And it was like, I remember someone said, I think Chuck Lorre said, they were so excited that there were more nerds, there were more characters to identify with.

So there was something in the zeitgeist, there was some hunger to connect. Okay, interesting point. To connect to these people. Because usually the nerd is just the one character. Maybe. Like historically there was the one gay usually the nerd is just the one character. Maybe. Like historically there was the one gay character. Exactly. The one Asian character.

And they're there as a token reference. This was like all sidekicks. Right. Usually, yeah, you get the door. I played sidekicks, a nerd. Now here's a show where they're the star. And I think people related to that. And in the live audience there, the 200 people that night, they kind of went crazy.

And I had a moment then thinking, this show is going to be on the air, and I think that people might actually kind of quietly and secretly watch it and like it. Slowly come out of their geek closet. Yeah, yeah. We were never going to be friends. We were never that handsome.

But then it kind of became that anti-friends. Or just friends, but with bad haircuts. So, Charles, do you think fans can identify with geeks more than with sort of good-looking, popular characters on shows like Friends? Of course. But why? We all have our insecurities. We all see ourselves as different. Even if we make ourselves up and strut ourselves around as being popular or famous or pretty, in the end,

we all are human, and we like to see people who are human, right? The best sitcoms are the ones who take the stereotypes, the caricatures, and then slowly but surely show that they are human just like all of us. So they can't be too beautiful, is what you're saying? If they are, they're just not as real. That's right. Well, talk about weird characters. One of the main characters on The Big Bank Theory is a socially awkward theoretical physicist named Sheldon. Sheldon didn't like you. They are. They're just not as real. That's right. Well, talk about weird characters. One of the main characters on The Big Bang Theory is a socially awkward theoretical physicist named Sheldon. Sheldon didn't like you and your scene. Now, I don't know if that was real or not,

because you... Well, check it out. Check this out. I'm quite familiar with Dr. Tyson. He's responsible for the demotion of Pluto from planetary status. I liked Pluto. Ergo, I do not like you. But I actually didn't demote Pluto. That was a vote of the International Astronomical Union. If ifs and buts were candy and nuts,

we'd all have a Merry Christmas. Think about that, Dr. Tyson. So, actually, I did go home and think about it deeply. Okay. I will offer a reflection on that exchange now. Okay, please do. Sheldon, get over it. Pluto had it coming.

Kudo had it coming. So up next, we'll take your questions about the real Big Bang Theory when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk. We're talking about the Big Bang Theory, a sitcom named after the origin of the universe itself. And actor Simon Helberg plays an aerospace engineer on the show. But in real life, he had a question for me about the real Big Bang.

Let's check it out. Okay. I'm sure you can answer this really quickly. And I know there are theories about the moments before the Big Bang, not the pilot. Moments before the Big Bang theory pilot, I was on a show called Studio 60. I'll answer that question. No, moments before the actual Big Bang. Is there a way to intellectually wrap my mind around what was going on before the Big Bang? We've tried. Okay. And the best discussions today, which have cogent arguments for why we should think this, is that our universe is part of a multiverse. Yes. And if you're part of a multiverse,

you can step back in a higher dimension and say, oh, here's the universe that Simon Helberg and Neil Tyson are in, and that just expanded. It just began right there. That's its Big Bang. Right. And then it expands. And then comes the TV show Big Bang Theory.

And that's that universe. Here's another universe that began a little later. Another one began a little earlier. Some universes don't expand forever. They might collapse. Some have slightly different laws of physics. Life does not begin in those. Right.

Some might have even better laws of physics for a more interesting form of life than perhaps what formed in ours. And so maybe the multiverse complex is what's eternal. Okay. And that doesn't have a beginning. Or maybe- Doesn't have a beginning. Or maybe it does, but it is what spawned our universe. But what's the beginning? The very beginning? Doesn't that just when you think about it, don't your eyes just cross and you just go to sleep?

It's a philosophical, intellectual, and scientific frontier. Plus, the universe never makes anything in ones. We thought Earth was special. No, it's one of eight planets. The sun is special. No, it's one of a hundred billion

suns. The galaxy. No, one of 100 billion galaxies. These are discoveries over the centuries. Right. But we have the universe. Right. Why would it only be one? Right.

Let it be many. And that would be just the next in the sequence of learning. Rules of three in comedy. I guess the universe is the funniest of them all, like you said. Sense of humor. But any more than three universes is not funny. I'll be sure to let them know. Yes, please.

Well, joining us now to help us get into the science of the actual Big Bang is theoretical physicist Jana Levin. Jana, welcome back! You're a professor at Barnard College at Columbia University. So how would you describe the Big Bang? Well, I think that what you're talking about.

How would you grade my answer? I thought your answer was excellent, actually. So the idea of a scientific notion of the origin of the universe, we know dates back not to Einstein himself, actually, but to people who were trying to solve his equations and realized that it was, the universe was really unstable to expanding. Unstable to expanding, meaning it's going to do that all by itself. Yeah, it just, it's really hard to stop it. And if you run the movie backwards, there's this inevitable implication that everything was closer together. The entire universe was closer together. And as you imagine going further back in that movie, there must have been this catastrophically high energy event. There's no other alternative. Okay. Now he asked what was around before then. Where would you land on that?

So I think if you start to say, how long was it before the Big Bang? Where were you standing when you were waiting for the Big Bang to happen? Then you're talking about space-time, and then you're talking about the universe. So if there was a where and when and a place before the Big Bang, it was part of a universe. It was part of a space-time. And that was what you alluded to, the idea that really our Big Bang is like a ginger root that was blown off of a larger space-time. That's beautiful. Yeah, and that it's just like a series of these ginger roots. space-time. That's beautiful. Yeah, and that it's just like a series of these ginger roots. But you also have to remember, because of the relativity of space and time, that when we look back at the

Big Bang as being an origin in time, that for somewhere else in the space-time, that might be a direction in space. So it's not easy to say that plume happened before this plume or that Big Bang happened before this bang. I think it becomes a much more abstract proposition that we're just part of this stranger ecosystem. But I appreciate the question, which is, aren't we sort of punting? Where did that come from? Right. Where did the original plume root come from?

Even for the multiverse. That's right. Are we back to Einstein's intuition, which was that it was always there, and maybe in some sense there's always been a space-time, and it's just our little plume that's... So how do you get across the concept of something that might not have had a beginning? That freaks people out. Yeah, I mean... I remember when I was a kid... Both are freaky. The idea that the universe has a beginning, it requires a lot of explanation. Yeah, I guess they're both weird. Yeah, I guess they're both weird.

And the idea, they're both weird. Yeah, yeah. Right? When all your options are weird, you know, it's like picking two to grab one. I'm in there. I just remember, I'm old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination and his funeral at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia. And they had this flame, and it was called the Eternal Flame.

And how old am I? I'm like five years old, and I was like, eternal? Whoa. What does that even mean? But then I got all geeky on it. I said, don't they have to put fuel in it? Oh, you started early.

If only there was Twitter back then. But it was the concept of something that was not finite. Yeah. That it was my first encounter with the non-finite. Yeah. And so the Big Bang is all about the non-finite. You got to live in that. So, Charles, how do you teach the Big Bang?

Any differently from Jana? What I like to convey to my students is that we have to stop thinking of time as this one thing that we're all stuck on. is that we have to stop thinking of time as this one thing that we're all stuck on. Each universe or sub-universe or multiverse has multiple directions in time. Just as we can think of left, right, up, down, forward, backward, we can think of time as going forward and backward, but it'll be different times in different parts of the multiverse if it exists. I'm more confused now.

Right. It starts getting confusing, but then it starts making more sense if you start realizing that you don't think of time as this thing where something has to be before it, something has to be in the present, and something has to be after it. That's only true in our universe. You are invoking wibbly wobbly timey wimey, aren't you? No, I'm actually invoking string theory. When we go to 11 dimensions, some sort of super-symmetric bulk, you can think of universes or versions of universes with more than one time dimension or different time dimensions

altogether. So our universe only began when time began in our universe. It started to tick. Tana, what's he talking about? He says more than one time dimension. I can't wrap my head around that. Yeah, I mean, I think the idea of there being extra spatial dimensions in general is really what string theory foists on us, but it's not specific only to string theory. I mean, as soon as we started talking about space time, people in 1915, 1920 were asking, why three, why three dimensions?

Excellent point. Yeah, it's not... Why not six or ten or anything? Why not six or ten? So that became a question, that became a scientific question you could ask, which is kind of funny. So why not turn it up to 11?

Why three dimensions? So that became a question. That became a scientific question you could ask, which is kind of funny. So why not turn it up to 11? Why three dimensions? So crank it up to 11. It's 11 all the way. Crank it up to 11. That's all I'm saying. So, Janet, how do you communicate what was around before anything was around? Well, I think this is exactly the question, that if you asked if you're saying before you're making a

temporal comparison and there had to be a space time and to enable that either you know the kind of classic response is if you're on the earth and you want to go north of the north pole you go south right so you if you're sticking to the earth if you're sticking to that constraint you go south so there is nothing north of the north pole the question is poorly phrased but i don't think we think like that anymore so we can't say what's before the big bang the question's poorly phrased. But I don't think we think like that anymore. So we can't say what's before the Big Bang. The question is poorly phrased if our universe is the only universe. But if it's not in the sense that you're describing of the multiverse, then we can say, oh, there is a space and a time prior. But, you know, they might not look at the Big Bang as being in the future. They might look at it as being in a spatial direction.

I love it that our feeble existence in this universe prevents us from possibly even knowing how to ask the right question. Yeah. Well, our StarTalk fans have their own questions about the science of the Big Bang, which takes us to the fan-favorite section of StarTalk called Cosmic Queries. Yes! So, Chuck, you got the question. Go for it.

Here we go. This is Tim Comey on Instagram who says, what exploded and what did it explode into? Janet, what exploded? Yeah, this is a classic question. Well, let me start with the second part. Because, so when a star explodes, we can point to the center of the explosion

and we watch the material plow out like a snow plow and so there's a center of the explosion and you can clearly see it that is not our model of the big bang there was no center every place in the universe as far away as we can see was once the center as were we there so it's it's not the explosion of something in space time it is sort of the eruption of space-time itself being created in that moment and stretching. Tim just answered that. I don't know what you're talking about.

No, no, no, it was good. That was a beautiful explanation, actually. That was beautiful. It was very eloquent. One thing that I really like to think of sometimes is like if you made a map of the universe and you just imagined focusing on the legend and the legend, the map was static.

You know, it was telling you the distance between us and Andromeda or the distance between us and a different galaxy. And the legend is telling you that that distance is increasing over time. The universe is expanding. If we run it backwards, every single point in space gets closer and closer together. But it's only happening at the level of the legend. Right. So nowhere on that map, imagine it's infinite and you slide it around, nowhere on that map can you point to the center. It's just that every place collapses to nothing.

Very cool. All right. Jacob Casey from Buffalo, New York says, what are some questions about the Big Bang that we hope to answer with the new James Webb Space Telescope? Charles. James Webb allows us to see literally to the beginning of the formation of stars and galaxies in our universe. So, whereas... It's tuned for that. Yeah. It's designed so that we can see the era when matter is first coming together and shining light through the universe that we can observe. through the universe that we can observe.

So those questions that can be answered by figuring out the origins of structure of the universe, stars, galaxies, planets, eventually people, that's what James Webb is going to try to address. And also in the later years, because it took a long time to design and build and it's not even launched yet, that they've added other kind of objectives for it, including looking deep into gas clouds

to explore the formation of stars and planets themselves. And possibly the formation of the supermassive black holes. Oh, in the centers of galaxies, yes. Yeah, why are there these black holes that are four million times the mass of the sun, a billion times the mass of the sun? Just lurking in the middle of every galaxy we've ever had the opportunity to see.

Right, they're basically sculpting the universe on the largest scales, and that was not at all foreseen. So where did they come from, and how are they influencing the formation of the entire large landscape of the universe? Chuck, keep it coming. All right, here we go. I'm supposed to hit the bell. This is from Starfish Skies on Instagram.

It says, what color was the Big Bang? Ooh. Was it the color of love? Jana, what color was the Big Bang? It's interesting that... I would say blue. See, I would have said white, which is all colors. No, but it would be very hot.

It would be very hot. Going through all colors, so then you get blue. So there is an interesting question about when it was right in the optical that we could actually talk about blue or red. So there was a moment in the universe's history when the light left over from the Big Bang was in the optical range that human beings could see. So I don't remember exactly when it was. Do you know, Charles, like a million, billion, million? What moment are you talking about? When the microwave background was not microwave but was optical. Oh no, it was formed. It was 3,000 degree glowing plasma. Right, so there was a time between then and now that it passed through the optical.

So there would have been a time where there was no night sky. Or had we had a planet. 3,000 Kelvin is already infrared, so it had to be before. Yeah, we got that. So, like, 6,000 Kelvin. Yeah. So, it's super early. Yeah. Super early then.

It's less than half. This is really what they do. No, seriously. This is it. Now, you know, that's why I just sat here. I'm like, I'm going to let this keep going. Chuck, next question. Here we go.

All right. This is from Lamis Piso on Instagram. I'm sure that's not how that person pronounces their own damn name. I'm sure they don't either, but guess what? Your name is now Lamis Piso. Okay, go. Where is all the anti-matter, and why do we think it was created with the Big Bang? Oh, Jana, give me some of that that's a

good oh this is beautiful because the fact that the universe is made of matter is a fluke we could very well have had an entirely antimatter universe but what was more likely is that there were equal portions of matter and antimatter and when matter and antimatter get together they genuinely annihilate into light and there's nothing left but light. So the real question isn't, is it matter or antimatter, but why isn't it perfectly equal proportions? Why is there any matter at all? Right. Why is there any excess of either?

It happens to be matter. It just doesn't matter. So it's crazy because it's tiny. It requires a tiny, tiny asymmetry in the very early universe to allow us to have galaxies and planets and stars. And this is something that is still debated. I mean, this is why we still have jobs. We don't know the answer to that question.

So a mismatch of matter and antimatter. Yeah, we don't know why that asymmetry exists. The excess is everything we know and love as matter. That's right. And you would think by rights that the universe would be created in equal proportions, that symmetry is favored, and so that there would be nothing. I hate science. We're back on StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History.

And we're talking about the portrayal of science and scientists on the TV show The Big Bang Theory. Let's check it out. It's always a challenge to tell stories about flawed characters and respond to a hope that all characters be portrayed without flaws. to a hope that all characters be portrayed without flaws. When you talk about a difference, say, in Penny's experiences as a sexual human being and Leonard's experiences as a sexual human being, one of the things that we've said about these people is that Penny was more social and Leonard was less social. And it's kind of a mathematical truth that people who

are more social have more opportunities for sexual experiences than people who are less social. I will defend the portrayal of Leonard and his sexuality with this pathetic explanation, which is for the first season, Leonard's sexual history was my sexual history. His awful. Can we cut there? But I'm just going to say his awful. I brought, you know, we all bring to our writing, especially writing comedy, we bring the pain of our own personal lives. There's no comedy without pain. There's no comedy without pain.

And Leonard's misbegotten inability to function with women and specific episodes from my sad, sad experiences, I gave them in the first season to Leonard. And so I will say that if the audience takes issue with the portrayal of a nerdy guy as being inexperienced sexually and unsuccessful with women, then all I can say is, well, yeah, but I lived it. Okay.

I don't know if that's a defense, but it certainly is true. So, Chuck, is there no comedy without pain? Is that a true thing? Did we all just laugh at his pain? I guess so. So you agree? Yeah. Okay. Nobody wants to? Yeah. Okay.

Nobody wants to hear anything there's, hey, my life is great. That's not funny. That's not funny. Okay. So, Jana, would you, I mean, it's a I'm nervous. No, we got you here. About this line of reasoning. I don't know. So, it's a sitcom and they're fictional characters.

But do you feel, I mean, you emanate from a nerd community, a nerd culture, I should say. Do you see it as an unfair treatment of the geek set that they're portraying nerdy scientists who are socially awkward? I don't think it's terribly interesting if everything we do is incredibly balanced and has a perfect, you know, that's anodyne. And it is fun sometimes to focus on the disastrous extrapolation of the extreme. And it amuses us because I think we all see a little bit of ourselves in it. We'd like to think we're not, you know, emblematic of that particular extreme, but we see a little bit of ourselves in it.

Right. It's a taste of it. Just as the writer did. Yeah. Just enough to say, whoa, that's a little hitting home, a little bit of ourselves. Right. It's a taste of it. Just as the writer did. Yeah. Just enough to say, whoa, that's a little hitting home, a little too... Yeah. In fact, for him, it was hitting home exactly for Bill Prady. Right. But that's the role of fiction, too, to allow us to indulge in the extreme. That's right.

Well, up next, we release the inner geek in us all when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History, Hall of the Universe. We're talking about the mega-hit TV show, The Big Bang Theory. I asked actor Simon Helberg why he thinks a show about geeky scientists is so popular. Let's check it out. I think there are much more, many more closeted geeks and scientists and lovers of the universe than we might have expected because I think there are times where we'll be rehearsing scenes and we're actors, so we pretend to be smart,

and we all think, what are we talking about? And we'll figure out kind of, we'll have to bend over backwards to understand the logic, and we think the audience will never get this, and we get out in front of the audience on a Tuesday night and they're with us from the moment we start speaking. And they're laughing at all the expected places. Yeah, so we truly are not smart

and just play geniuses on TV or it's just the subculture is not so much a subculture as it is the culture. It's just been kind of hidden or just untapped. I do believe that it was just an untapped, beautiful thing sitting there, and we came along and- A ripened fruit. A ripened fruit that we have splattered across the world.

splattered across the world. So, Charles, do you think geek culture has become geek chic? I'll take it one step further and say geek culture has always been the culture. Have you ever imagined whether Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci were cool kids? They probably weren't. But today, that's all we talk about when we think about the Renaissance or the beautiful works of art or the amazing discoveries of the past. So the answer is yes, geek culture is the culture and it always will be the culture. So let me ask the two of you, each of you, what advice would you give to shy geeks who are either in the closet

or otherwise sort of suppressing their inner geekitude? It gets better. The question here? I think that we're acknowledging that there's something really beautiful in people who are

intensely focused on something they're profoundly curious about. And that lack of a filter, you know, the awkwardness of these characters, a lot of it is just the filter. There's no false front, right? They just are right there. There's no facade. There's no facade.

And there's something about that that's incredibly lovable. So here are all these people watching this and loving these characters. I think the advice is, you know, having no false front is lovable. Go for it. Well, another lead character on The Big Bang Theory is a scientist played by actress Mian Bialik. And she's also a scientist in real life and a former guest on StarTalk.

She's a neuroscientist, professionally. And this is a fictional character who happens to be a real scientist. That's just a curious fact. I'm wondering, Janet, were you influenced by any fictional role models? You know, I don't think I was that much. I wish there were better fictional role models that I either knew about or had easy access to. I think I was very influenced by real scientists.

And it took me a while to know. We talked about Carl Sagan. You and I have talked about this before. I mean, it sounds really corny, but I used to love to talk to my dad about Carl Sagan. And we would make fun of the way he spoke. We'd make fun of the way he said billions. Billions, billions. But it was this affectionate teasing.

We were totally consumed by it. And we used to read his books together. But I swear to you, it never occurred to me at any time as a child, even then, that I would be a scientist. It came later. I didn't self-identify. Later, like when? College. College? Yeah. Late bloomer. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. It was midway through college. And when I discovered physics, it was answering these

tremendous questions. And it felt transcendent. It felt true for everybody, and that it wasn't, it felt true for somebody in a remote part of the planet, in a remote part of the world. Now you got me worried that there might be others who didn't have that revelation who could have been great physicists as you have become. Who are we missing? Yeah, I think about that a lot. Now you're bumming me out. Who are we missing? Yeah, I think about that a lot. Who are we missing? Now you're bumming me out.

So, Charles, do you think the pop culture presence of the Big Bang Theory is helping people release their inner geeks? Like it's an enabling force? Absolutely. It's helping to break that stereotype. I mean, it's long since time for that stereotype to break. Athletes can be smart. Priests can be scientific. Athletes can be smart, priests can be scientific, and scientists can be open, happy, and sexy.

How did you get that priests can be scientists? How did you get that one? The person who taught me theoretical cosmology in graduate school is a Jesuit priest. Okay. He was thinking about... A Jesuit priest. Yeah. Not just any priest. But a priest nonetheless.

Yeah, yeah. Not just any priest. Okay. That's the academic order of the Catholic Church. I was going to say, the Jesuits are the ones who love science. Yeah, yeah. Jesuits are like the science badasses. The Jesuit priest.

Yeah. And he was discovering and working seriously, mathematically, understanding the origins of the universe. And he was doing it perhaps to reveal the greater glory of whom he believed was God. But nevertheless, he was very much scientific. Your motivation actually doesn't matter as long as you are driven to be curious and to solve the problem. And he really helped me learn a lot and understand a lot about cosmology. So I have no problem with that.

So Chuck, do you think shows like The Big Bang Theory will improve the urge for people to want to hang out with scientists? No. That's it. I'm out of here. So in this final clip, I ask Big Bang Theory co-creator Bill Prady if making science more popular was his goal all along.

Check it out. Our goal wasn't to promote science. Our goal wasn't to promote NASA. Our goal wasn't to promote physics. We're in the silliness business. Our goal was to present, you know, 30 minutes of comedy that you would come back to and laugh and enjoy.

But because we put these guys in the world of physics, one of the things we've come to learn about over the last decade is an increase in the number of people choosing the hard sciences vocationally. And for a lot of people, they pointed to the Big Bang Theory saying, I didn't know that science class, which I enjoy in school, I didn't know that's actually a job you can have in life. And an unintended thing, but kind of a wonderful thing. You know, I'm old enough to remember when there was a scientist on television, or especially in a movie. I'm going back decades now, many decades. Who was that person?

It was a person usually with wiry hair, lab coat behind a slab. And the main characters who you actually cared about might have to get some answer from that scientist. Is the radiation safe or is the giant bug going to kill us all? So they'll run into the room, speak to the scientist. The scientist will say, everything will be okay, just do this. They'll say, thanks, doc. And then they move on and the camera follows the main characters leaving the doctor behind.

Leaving the scientist without any other kind of developed character. You would never know and as a result you would never even care. Is that scientist married? Does the scientist have children? Are they sad that day? Are they in love? All the emotions that were handed to everybody else in a story. So I, for one, am delighted, even proud, to live in a moment where the number one show on television was about scientists, though they be caricatures. And I don't even care if a movie gets some science wrong. It's got science in it at all. It's got people talking about the science because science is mainstreaming.

There are artists reaching out to scientists to have science infuse their creativity. There are people recognizing that scientists might know some stuff that might prolong your life, that might produce wealth, that could bring security to this nation and to the world. And so scientists can be major figures in sitcoms, in movies, and in real life. This has been a Cosmic Perspective from StarTalk. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Join me in thanking once again Chuck Nice, Charles Lu, Jen Eleven. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.