full interview_david saltzberg_1.mp4
David Saltzberg [00:00:00] I'm David Salzberg. I'm a professor of physics and astronomy, and I was also the science consultant for the Big Bang Theory and M for Young-Sheldon.
Speaker 2 [00:00:12] So physics as a subject of a sitcom seems very complicated.
David Saltzberg [00:00:21] One of the head writers explained to me what my role and the role of physics was in the show. And he said, when you watched I Love Lucy, you didn't need to know Spanish to know that Ricky Ricardo was angry.
Speaker 2 [00:00:38] So what about the
David Saltzberg [00:00:38] Yeah, so. The stories in The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon are human stories. They're stories that are conflicts with your best friend or your girlfriend. They are never really stories about physics. Physics is the life that they're living where these stories are unfolding. But the stories always started with some real human emotion or human trouble. And it was just these particular characters who happened to be physicists and engineers.
Speaker 2 [00:01:10] But yet nothing. And you can, by the way, the answers don't have to be this short. Oh, okay. No, I understand that.
Speaker 3 [00:01:18] Okay, fine, I'll give you whatever you want, it's fine. You just want me to talk more, okay.
Speaker 2 [00:01:22] I think the question of there is physics, however, marbled throughout the series, okay? And it's not been watched by normal people who might not know the concept. So tell us about how that all works.
David Saltzberg [00:01:42] So what happened is the scripts would have a physics-size hole that would come back to me. There would be something like the gang is doing something on the roof with lasers or with physics at least. And the story that's unfolding is the love interest Penny is bringing a different man around and things are happening in their tents and that's the real story. But they're physicists and engineers. They're doing something on the roof. The writers would come to me with a physics-sized whole of what are they doing on the roof? That was really helpful to me to get these very specific questions. If you said to me, have some of the gang do some physics, it's too vast. Your brain just freezes up. It's probably a little bit like telling a comedian, say something funny right now. But when they gave me constraints like it had to be on the roof at night immediately ideas would come into my head. So for example, I had recently seen a talk about people shooting lasers at the moon to test general relativity. And they were shooting lasers of the moon which would then reflect back off of mirrors left by the Apollo astronauts. So immediately that popped into my mind and immediately gives them something to do. And then what was wonderful was the writers would come back with all these jokes that were very specific to shooting lasers on the moon. Will it blow up? And so that was very gratifying to see that. But it was really interesting. And I'd have trouble coming up with too many more examples. But it always a little physics-size hole. Sometimes it was just a little piece of dialog. So one particular physics-sized hole was Sheldon is at the Division of Motor Vehicles, the DMV. So Sheldons at the DMB, and he's explaining to Penny why he never got a driver's license. She says, well, what were you doing when you were 16 years old? And then he just says, science to come, in brackets in the script. And so I would give them ideas. Now, for me, I never knew for sure if they wanted something short or long. I never know if they want something that the point was it was unintelligible, or something that the audience with a little high school science would almost understand or even understand. So I would the writers many options, five, six options, and they would choose from them.
Speaker 2 [00:04:13] Why would you take time out from your scientific practice to work on a TV show?
David Saltzberg [00:04:21] So one thing that was wonderful about working on the Big Bang Theory was it happened in the evenings so I could still have my life as a scientist and not interrupt it with going to a sound stage very often. So once a week I would go to the show and see it taped. I'd be on hand in case there was a question. It was a lot of fun. It was like going to a show. The writers would talk to me about ideas they have for stories in future. Episodes and then that's really important to be there in person. I wasn't really needed in person the For the episode that was being taped that night. It was very rare that they would change Dialog that was scientific I became friends and colleagues with so many of the writers and others who built the show. And when you're just standing there, it's really easy in five minutes to say, I'm thinking about this idea, how would this be? You can go back and forth three or four times. If you try to do that by email, the first email may never be sent. You won't quite have the what do you mean and really close the loop. So I'm a big believer in in-person interactions for trying to make something.
Speaker 2 [00:05:34] What about the larger point about making science available in the wider world?
David Saltzberg [00:05:45] So I grew up watching Nova episodes on PBS and stories about Oppenheimer that were very scientific. And these were hour long shows and it fit what I wanted to see. Here we don't spend an hour talking about quantum mechanics but we do get out the fact that people are arguing about quantum mechanic and black holes in one sentence. Maybe there are tens of thousands of people out there that Google it and learn a little more. I also think what's important is not so much the science itself and getting across that the particular new scientific endeavor is underway, but just that young people see that this is a life that one can have. One can do science as a living with other people that love it. It's quite possible that kids out there in elementary school are learning science and it's all stuff from the 18th century, 17th century. It's presented as something which is complete. But it's not. It's something that we do every day, and we do together as a group. And so if I were to guess the impact, it was just showing that there is a possibility to have a life as a scientist and do current cutting-edge science, and that it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 [00:06:58] It does look like a lot of fun to me, which is not the first thing you think about if you're not a physicist.
David Saltzberg [00:07:04] Sometimes people would complain about the show showing the characters in some particular ways, which were consistent with their actual personalities, so that was fine by me. But the larger view is that they were really having fun. They enjoyed it. You could not watch the show and not realize that they loved science and engineering.
Speaker 2 [00:07:25] And what do you think that says about the way we teach science in America today?
David Saltzberg [00:07:37] I mean, so I'm not, I don't know very much about K through 12 education so I can't really comment on that. I know there are heroes out there teaching at every level. In my own classes, I'm teaching something called Physics 1A right now, which you can tell from the number and letter is the introduction. For me though, I let the science speak for itself. I let physics speak for its self. I always thought that was so exciting. Just what it was. I can't create something better than what Newton and others created. So I don't tend to dress it up. I don't tend to make it so flashy or add anything. I really try to present the science for what it is and many, if not most, students appreciate that.
Speaker 2 [00:08:24] What about one of the themes in our series is about art and science are kind of siloed these days. And that wasn't always the case in the history of science. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. I mean, part of it is the thing about science is that there are people who probably like, young people, like they kind of knew that's kind of what they wanted to do. But then there's people who feel like the pennies of it, who feel they can't handle it. And that's not necessarily the case.
David Saltzberg [00:09:05] I know more about science than I know about art, but I saw some art come together when this sitcom was being made. And there's a lot of commonalities. It takes hard work, it takes dedication, and it takes a desire to do a great job, which we really saw in these shows. So in that sense, there's lot of a commonality. I do some volunteer work for something called the Science and Entertainment Exchange. It's an idea that, it's run by the national, there's an office called the Science and Entertainment Exchange. This office has a giant Rolodex of scientists. So you need to understand spiders that live in volcanoes, they've got someone for you. So when a filmmaker calls up or a TV producer calls up says I need this expert, they can find just the right person. And hopefully by having a little extra input, it adds more to the creative process.
Speaker 2 [00:09:59] Did you find scientists, do they enjoy watching the Big Bang Theory? I mean, is there stuff in there that you feel like you could be a physicist and really have a good time and not go, oh my god, it's just so unrealistic?
David Saltzberg [00:10:12] I worked very hard to avoid the, oh my god, this is so unrealistic. That was on me, and the writers supported that. That was what they wanted. They didn't want anyone to say, oh, my god that's so unrealistic, so for example, once Sheldon and Leonard's mother were working on something called quantum brain dynamic theory, and it made sense because he was a physicist of quantum systems, and she who is a neuroscientist. So it's a very sensible thing for them to be working on, the idea that the brain and consciousness is driven by quantum mechanics. Well, this idea is not particularly favored among scientists. So I had to unfortunately tell the writers, well, you know, I know that you needed it and it was perfect. It's your show, but it's just my job to tell you about that. So the writers didn't say anything. I got back the next version of the script, and the two of them were working on disproving quantum brain dynamics. So whether or not science is gonna be accurate in a movie or TV show is a creative decision. It's not the job of a science consultant to be the physics police. My job is to let them know that something doesn't quite sound right to the ear, or to give them ideas about what they might do. But not every show should be scientifically accurate. Imagine if we had a scientifically accurate back to the future. Well, Marty wouldn't go back in time. Wouldn't be a lot to happen in the movie series. So... Leave the question of accuracy to the creative people. Let them make the show and the story they want to make. But when they do want either accurate science or even gonzo science, we here as a scientist, we're here to help.
Speaker 2 [00:11:59] Tell us about creativity, you mentioned the word creativity. Where does creativity come in? We know what an artist is creating, so get that. What about with science?
David Saltzberg [00:12:07] So when creative things happen to me in my own work, if it's not frequent enough. It tends to be the result of having worked very hard on something, completely understanding something. So I don't sit back and go, hmm, it's time for me to be creative now about this project. Instead it's once I completely understand how a piece of electronics works or a piece of science works, sometimes it will occur to me for a way to make it much better. Not always, sometimes what I have is already optimal, but other times you just see something. And it's... Not something you can plan, but you have to, in my opinion, be really honest about your level of understanding of something, and if you don't quite understand it, you need to work a little harder, and once you reach that point where you completely understand something and why it works, there's an opportunity for creative thoughts then to come to you.
Speaker 2 [00:13:05] Can you remember, how do you feel when you have a creative break?
David Saltzberg [00:13:11] Thinking about one creative breakthrough I had early in my career that allowed us to double the number of particle physics events of a certain kind, we were able to write the tape. And it didn't work out the way you would think it was, so I had been working very hard on understanding the system, and an idea came to me, which turned out to be the idea that helped, but it wasn't immediately obvious to me that this idea was actually so helpful. I kept it around, and it was just by chance I was talking to someone and saying, and hey, I'm thinking about this. Where he said, oh, that's a good idea. And so that little impetus of someone saying, by the way, that a little nugget. That's something you should pay attention to. And then it doesn't take long. The big ideas, I think, are generally pretty quick. So in an evening, I could put together what was needed to be known. Of course, there's lots of details to work out. So it was not a eureka moment. It was actually rather the opposite of, I had this idea. I didn't let it go. And In the process of talking to people and having it come up more than once, I decided, okay, let's pursue this.
Speaker 2 [00:14:21] I'm not hearing the noises. You're not hearing what? They're crashing around in the kitchen. That's all that matters. OK. I mean, he's so present. He's so president. OK. So with an artist, they do a painting. We make a film, OK? And it's done. And then we move on. Science doesn't seem to be like that. Whatever you're interested in, professional. You're not going to know the answer. Who knows? It'll be hundreds of years, maybe, right? Whatever the problem is, there's knowledge out there that you're not gonna be able to see. What does that feel like?
David Saltzberg [00:15:00] So, one of the things we create in the sign ticket... One of the things we create in the scientific endeavor, so to speak, is scientific results, new knowledge, papers. But another thing we create is our students. We leave behind the next generation of more than us, of people that think about problems a certain way. They're usually better than us. And that's really our legacy to the scientific enterprise is the next-generation that we'll be doing.
Speaker 2 [00:15:30] In one of my anthocese, the book I've done before. What do you want me to say? What about, sorry, what about? You mentioned Newton, for example. You mentioned Heisenberg. Sheldon, my son sent me the link to Sheldone Teaches Penny Physics. And you had this whole chart where he was running off his famous names over the centuries. You're kind of working in a field that's been developed by a really, really long time. I mean, the artist is trying to just be painting whatever they're painting.
David Saltzberg [00:16:07] Well, but they also have, so one thing about science, which is probably true in art too, is there's an enormous amount of material and ideas and techniques that have happened before. And we're creating the next generation. I was created by the previous generation. We somehow have to get in there and be productive after about five years of study. So what you can do is you can be very narrow and very specific and maybe make it to the point where you can contribute new knowledge. And once you know how that works, you can then branch out sideways. But it's an interesting thing to think about how there's hundreds of years of work that have gone before you, and you only have your lifetime to make a new contribution.
Speaker 2 [00:16:53] Do you ever feel like you're finished? That was a great answer. Do you feel like your finished? Is there a way to be finished, or is it just this? Always looking for the next thing.
David Saltzberg [00:17:05] Well, of course, our scientific projects are never finished. If you have a big discovery, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson, which happened in 2012, that didn't end Higgs Boson science. Now we need to know, is it really the Higg's Boson we thought it was? Does it decay into the particles the simplest theory says, or is there a more complex theory that we haven't thought of that's really what's operating in the universe? So, often you get these big discoveries and it actually... Makes a bigger flurry of activity afterwards. It rarely is an ending, but a beginning.
Speaker 2 [00:17:44] What was the thing that made you want to be a scientist?
David Saltzberg [00:17:53] I can't think of any one particular thing that made me want to be a scientist as I grew up. I did watch a lot of PBS and loved the stories that were shown in NOVA, the show Connections. There was a wonderful series about Oppenheimer in the early 80s. I loved all that. My parents were very supportive of education. My father was an engineer and so we were, electrical engineer, we were able to talk a lot about the things that were underlying physics. Scientific American used to come to the house, and so even though I couldn't really understand it, I flipped through it. So it was in the air. And my friends and I would watch science fiction, even if it was something like Space, 1999, which I don't know that's known for its scientific.
Speaker 3 [00:18:39] We're going to have to wait and see.
David Saltzberg [00:18:42] So of course you want to have that creative spark, something new that you bring to the table for science. And what's really important is that you completely understand the system you're working on. When you completely understanding something, that's when your new ideas can come about. And while you're trying to completely understand something, you're not always going to be correct from the very beginning. And you may proceed with an incomplete knowledge and what you're try to do may fail. And that's okay. We fail all the time. And that's how you learn. That your knowledge of the system or whatever you're doing was incomplete, and you move on. Now you hope the failure doesn't involve breaking a lot of expensive equipment, so we learn how to be careful and maybe discuss with others before throwing that switch, but we fail all the time.
Speaker 2 [00:19:29] And is it upsetting when it's something you really hit your hopes on because of rigorous testing?
David Saltzberg [00:19:37] I mean, there's small scale failures and there's big scale failures. You might have a setback in the lab for a day and that's okay. That's just doing business. That's what we're used to. There have been cases where people have built, for example, a balloon payload or a rocket payload for years and it just gets, through no fault of their own, destroyed. And that's just heartbreaking. There's really no way to dress that up and say that was a good thing.
Speaker 4 [00:20:14] So sort of off of one of Louis' earlier questions about what got you into science, I'm curious if you could just kind of expound, you know, not so much the things that drew you to but what is it in the highest, most poetic level, what do you love?
David Saltzberg [00:20:32] Well, I was drawn into science, as I know it now in high school, had terrific teachers and high school teachers have such an impact on what people do. And it was really a social enterprise. My friends and I loved doing physics problems. We would start with the last chapter in the book, the hardest one, and work the other direction until we got bored. So it was like puzzle solving, it was problem solving, and it was something you did with your friends. It was a lot of fun and that's what brought me in. And even now, I'm teaching that same material 28 years later, and I still feel it. I still love how it feels to solve one of those tricky problems, or when the answer has a really nice result that you can understand.
Speaker 4 [00:21:24] So when you had a science-to-come moment on the show and your job was to give them an answer that was realistic, maybe a few seasons in, did you have a kind of peripheral part of your brain that started thinking, well, this might be a little funny or this could work well without even trying? Did that kind of grow?
David Saltzberg [00:21:45] So I always gave them a little bit, oh sorry. So the scripts would come often with a science to come, a little physics-sized hole for me to fill with some dialog. And I would give them five or so options and I would try to guess which one they were gonna like the best. And I think I did worse than randomly. Sometimes I would think something would be funny. Even after a few years, you'd think I would start to learn. But they would always come up with something funnier and different and unexpected. And that's their job and I think it's the unexpected nature of the humor which is why I couldn't do it. So one way I explain what it's like to try to come to the writers with something that I think is funny. There'll be times that in the evening here I'll be at a party and someone will come up to me who's not a scientist and say I have a great new theory of gravity let me tell you about it and I'm just sitting back and saying uh-oh finding a way to be polite. Well, that's the face I would see on the writers if I tried to suggest something funny. So they've had decades of experience, each one of them making something funny, making something real, making something emotional. And even though I've been around it and I love being around it, it was really not possible for me to do what they do. I'm reminded by one, I reminded of a character in a movie, I think it was called Mr. Saturday Night and Billy Crystal was a comedian. And he had a brother who was around it all the time. And he loved it. He loved seeing it happen. He loved see them put.
Speaker 2 [00:23:25] The brother, yeah, so sorry. Let's start by saying the brother left.
David Saltzberg [00:23:28] The brother loved seeing his brother making comedy and making the audience laugh. But even though he'd been around it for decades, he could never do it himself. And I think that's my role or my... He'd never do it himself, and sometimes that's how I feel around the writers and creators of these shows like Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon, is I love being near it, I can't do it myself, but I really admire what they're doing.
Speaker 2 [00:23:55] They also can't do it without you because you can't do a show about four sciences and just mix it up.
David Saltzberg [00:24:03] So I'm glad I have a role to play.
Speaker 4 [00:24:07] I just have one more question about, you know, we're always finding these connections between where an artist really needs or values a scientist to do their work and vice versa. I'm curious if you have any examples, or just broadly speaking, of where an artists or an artistic enterprise has really helped you as a scientist in your work.
Speaker 3 [00:24:29] Wow.
Speaker 4 [00:24:29] Or inspired you to change your thinking, something like that.
David Saltzberg [00:24:34] So by the way, it goes both ways. We've been talking about how I, as a scientist, can bring something to the storytellers and the creators of a show. In my own research work where we, for example, build balloon payloads, we have to construct a lot of things, I had a graduate student that used to do set construction in theater. And so she knew how to use a sawzall. She always had a good idea of how to join things together, what we might buy that would be an efficient way to make a detector that would not fall apart. So that was an example of theatrical skills going back towards science. Is that the kind of answer you wanted?
Speaker 2 [00:25:16] Collaboration.
David Saltzberg [00:25:19] That's kind of low-level, but in terms of someone...
Speaker 2 [00:25:26] That's a hard one. You know what the question is? The question of beauty. I mean, when you look at you, we spent some time with this A.I. Artist yesterday with the Ganondorf. This is very complicated stuff, but it's gorgeous. It's just gorgeous. Science has beauty, right? But where do you find beauty in science and math and all that stuff?
David Saltzberg [00:25:49] There's one point in Big Bang Theory where they really wanted to have something beautiful because Leonard was trying to win back his girlfriend and she visited him in the lab. And they asked me to help figure out what he would say and what it was he would do. That was one of the rare cases where I was able to bring in some dialog into a script. And we talked about the idea that the universe could be a hologram, that in fact Everything about the universe is really a surface. But we experience it in three dimensions. And they added in some beautiful pictures and some beautiful lab techniques. And while that was going on, I could hear the audience got super quiet. They were really engaged in what was being said. And some of those words were words that I contributed. And so that was a really gratifying experience. It was a out-of-body experience really to feel that and to think that the writers of the show feel that all the time. Must be really wonderful for them.
Speaker 2 [00:26:48] It was an episode that I think my son must have sent me to click the other day. It was, or maybe it was on TV. Leonard and whoever shall be Marion Bialik's character. Amy. Aiming, okay, I guess are really getting along very well doing physics together and Penny feels left out, okay? And there's a whole thing where they did this whole sort of, they were just, they were, they, were ripping on physics from each other, you know, like they were connecting and that's why Penny felt jealous. Right. Okay, did you, you remember? I actually don't remember.
David Saltzberg [00:27:20] I actually don't remember that scene, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 [00:27:22] No, I just because it
David Saltzberg [00:27:25] The example of Leonard and Amy working on a scientific project and Penny feeling jealous because they're having a moment and she's not included, that's an example of how the show was put together, as explained to me, that these were human emotions, human stories. Two people are getting along together and the third person is jealous. Then the science came in for the details. What is it specifically that they're doing? But we wouldn't start with the idea like, oh, they're working on graphene, let's to make a story. The story came in as a human story and then we would sprinkle the science on it to make it specific to these individual characters.
Speaker 5 [00:28:01] That's great. That will work very well. Thank you. Can I ask a question? So you are a scientist. You think like a scientist?
David Saltzberg [00:28:09] Probably do.
Speaker 5 [00:28:13] Who are not scientists, who are artists of one sort or another. Do you think that your way of approaching something, the airway of approaching, are similar or distant, the way of thinking, the way in which they look at the world in the way that they envision it?
David Saltzberg [00:28:34] So I'm gonna start by repeating something which I thought was similar, but then I'm going to flip to something else. So much of the artistic enterprise seems to be like the scientific enterprise. I came up in the science world where everyone was really dedicated to what they were doing, worked very hard, and wanted to have a good result. And what was really nice to see when I started getting involved in this Hollywood stuff is how it's really the same people with the same drive, decades of experience, a real drive to make a quality product, something that they're proud of, and people working together with a lot of skills to make it happen. So in that sense... The artistic endeavor and the scientific endeavor were very close. I do remember one story where I saw that artists and scientists were a little bit different. We had a graduate student who came to us from the art world, had been working in music actually, and came to use and we needed to work with him a little on how to explain what he was doing. He would do what I would call something nonlinear. We would hear something about the middle of what he did, then we might hear how he started, then we would hear how it ended up. So we worked very hard on his linear thinking. And then one day I was at a party here in Los Angeles and someone was telling me about an artist they know, a young artist, who had come from the science world. And they said, this is a very talented scientist, but we really had to work on breaking him of this linear thinking
Speaker 5 [00:30:10] So, in other words...
David Saltzberg [00:30:12] So in that sense, it's familiar.
Speaker 3 [00:30:13] They're not the same.
David Saltzberg [00:30:14] Not the same, so maybe that doesn't fit in your show, but...
Speaker 3 [00:30:18] Just to make it.
Speaker 5 [00:30:19] Play.
David Saltzberg [00:30:19] Yeah
Speaker 5 [00:30:20] Here's another thing about it, we've interviewed other physicists, and some of them, well one of them in particular is a jazz musician, and he will say that, well you know what, it's not like there are two sides of his brain, but in fact because when I'm playing my music, I can very often, it takes me to a different place where I can have a different way of looking at my own work. Is there something in that? To understand.
David Saltzberg [00:30:53] I know there are a lot of people who do science who also have an artistic side to them that are musicians. Perhaps most famously Albert Einstein was a violinist. Myself, most of my time is spent with science. I really don't have an artist side so I don't know what that's about.
Speaker 2 [00:31:12] Do you seek, I don't know, it was about popping out of the lab as it were, not talking to his colleagues, but talking to these guys who are serious jazz players. Stefan Alexander, I didn't know if you know who he is, and he said that's what I should kind of get to, it's like a fresh perspective is what I'm looking for. And maybe for you, it's a hike in the mountains.
David Saltzberg [00:31:38] Yeah, I'm not going to be able to give you a very good answer to this. Let's try to think for a minute. I mean, it always does help to talk to people outside your field about your problem. Just the process of explaining it is incredibly frustrating because you explain the problem, they inevitably completely misunderstand it when they parrot it back to you. So you keep repeating and repeating what it is and at times that can help clarify your thinking.
