Science on Television: Entertaining, Inspiring, Accurate

This would be the screenplay describing my family’s conversation about the extremely popular television comedy, “The Big Bang Theory”. Now, if you don’t know the characters, I highly recommend catching a clip, and I guarantee that you will either know a ‘Sheldon’ or perhaps be a ‘Sheldon’, not that there’s anything wrong with that. The characters are researchers at CalTech, full of the quirks and quips that we as physicists all know. The show itself is a comedy – not intended to accurately represent all science or all scientists (Back to the Future doesn’t exactly get the science right, but it’s still a classic and beloved movie). But what’s particularly great is that Big Bang Theory isn’t just a comedy where the backdrop is science, instead science is woven within the storylines and character development in a way that evolves as the show’s characters evolve and develops in a way that’s both entertaining, engaging, and pretty accurate.

We (by which I mean all physicists) can thank David Saltzberg for this endearing and engaging portrayal. Saltzberg is a particle physicist at UCLA who collaborates at CERN and with the US Antarctic Program searching for high energy particles (TeV or EeV levels). But, wearing his other hat, he is the main scientific consultant on the Big Bang Theory, consulting each week on the upcoming episode. “I never expected to be drawn into show business” Saltzberg comments, but as he notes, one role of a University is to help the local community and local industry. It just so happens that for UCLA, the local community is Hollywood, and the local industry is the entertainment business.

Despite the seemingly polar opposite nature between a lab and movie set, Saltzberg has noted striking similarities – “a sound stage is basically the same as a high bay, without the cranes”. Essentially, a movie or tv set is an empty box where the work gets done. There’s the equivalent of a PI – head writers making the final call on creative decisions; technicians working on the electrical, carpentry, painting, and producers who are organizing it all, essentially in the project manager role. The end product may be different, but it’s still people who are putting it all together, and so the process has developed along a parallel track of organization. Moreover, each department is filled with people who have decades of experience and have gone through their own trials and tribulations to get to their current position. Saltzberg highlights the dedication of the writers, who aim to nail down each aspect of a scene and character in order to portray an accurate representation, one that can draw the audience in and convince them of the characters and their interactions. Experimental science has much of the same with successful teams built over time comprised of dedicated and passionate people working toward specific goals.

With Big Bang Theory under his belt, Saltzberg has expanded his consulting to include a new role with an alternate project, Manhattan. This series is a fictionalized account of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, including the roles of laboratories like Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge. For this series, Saltzberg’s contribution is of a different flavor – as opposed to advising on including contemporary science to keep plots interesting, here are complex story lines which need specific details about the gadget being built. Instead of looking through all of modern physics for inspiration, he needed to more deeply know a smaller subset of high energy density physics. While Saltzberg didn’t start out as an expert in 1940s weapon physics, he was able to quickly get up to speed because his science background provided the framework to learn the new physics. In doing so he demonstrated an important skill – a skill that we as researchers often don’t recognize that we even have – the ability to be faced with a question to which we do not know the answer and to forge forward with, need I say it, researching until we develop an answer or at least a hypothesis for how to develop an answer.

Saltzberg notes that feedback from colleagues on his roles with the various shows has shifted from skeptical to highly positive. Initially, there was concern over how scientists would be portrayed – even my father (someone who has a physicist as a daughter) doesn’t have much of a view of the personality side of scientists. Each character in any single episode might be one-dimensional, but over time, they develop; a story can’t be told solely with one-dimensional characters. Saltzberg notes, “For Big Bang Theory, it’s a comedy; it isn’t intended to be about perfect people, and the show has great writing and acting.” It all comes together to be about interesting, relatable people doing interesting science, which starts to become more relatable over time as well.

For as many personalities as there are within physics, there are as many ways to be involved with society and with communicating why what we as scientists do is so exciting and important. This can be as simple as having conversations with non-scientist coworkers about the Astronomy picture of the day. Or, for Saltzberg, it’s become a unique combination of an active researcher and a scientific consultant for television shows. Our image as scientists is in good hands, as is the search for ultra high energy particles.

These contributions have not been peer-refereed. They represent solely the view(s) of the author(s) and not necessarily the view of APS.