Blog post: Disillusioned Physicist: Sheldon Cooper is not a good physicist.

The following is a reworking of a previous post, for this I would apologise, but am pretty sure you mostly do not care.

Let me start by talking a bit about The Big Bang Theory (TBBT) tv show. I like the show for the most part, it seems to work well and I only normally feel slightly surprised when they do things like putting on safety goggles to use liquid nitrogen, safe yes, often carried out, no. The characters have attributes that I could easily point to many of my colleagues and say "they act like x". Therefore I would say I am neither a fan boy nor a critic of the show, if it's on I'll watch it, but I tend not seek it out.

More generally now, there seems to be a perception with the non-scientists of the world that we are an elitist group who spend all of their time agreeing with each other.  This is often visible to me in the form of online forum posts but recently TBBT also alarmed me with the views of one of its physicists. I bet you can't guess which?

This is very much not the case.  Science is a hot bed of arguments and discussion.  I have recently seen a public display of this with a well known (in the UK) public figure and a blogger I hold in high regard.  I'll go into this in a little more depth below.  First I will explain some of the problems I have with the character from TBBT.

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