If you are like me and never saw an episode of The Big Bang Theory, then you can still prepare for Friday's seminar: its official home page is
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/big_bang_theory/.
Gosh, over the weekend, I watched the full episode 1, but it seems to have been removed! The best you can do now is watch some clips. Warning! They force you to watch a commercial first! The one entitled "Behind the Scenes" tells just about all you need to know: Four nerdy geniuses (but mainly two) from Caltech encounter a beautiful, social, sexy dumb blonde. Based on the one episode I saw, it's a really dumb show, despite the authentic equations and occasional scientific allusions that probably go over the top of the viewers. Everything I saw was stereotypical.
Would any kid watching this ever want to become a scientist? The show probably does more harm than good.
Of course, you can try the source of all knowledge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bang_Theory_%28TV_series%29
Interesting that the wiki writer claims "Almost all the equations on Leonard and Sheldon's boards are not real mathematical equations, as most of them are too simple and make no real physical sense." The few I saw briefly looked ok, so we can ask David Saltzberg about this.
-Marty
P.S. Looks as if there are episodes online elsewhere, but I haven't watched them:
http://video.aol.com/video-category/full-episodes/111483 has four.
This page seems to provide links to all of them:
http://www.stashy.com/videos/user/tv-shows/The+Big+Bang+Theory/.
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1 comment:
Real nerds would rather watch SciFi...
After attending the Friday afternoon seminar about this nerd-based television sitcom, I decided I had to watch it. I convinced my husband (Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) that we should tape it to watch before bed. He - a true nerd, who would much rather watch SciFi- reluctantly agreed to try it out. Well, he fell asleep within the first five minutes! I tried again the following week; this time, he fell asleep in three minutes.
After my second viewing of this show, I concur with the behavior of my lovable nerd husband: the show is not even funny after a while, even if they do use equations correctly. I don't think a show like this does anything to help the cause of physics or physics education.
As for me - I'm waiting for the new season of Battle Star Galactica!
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