Howard does work at JPL (he mentions it many times). But JPL is administered by Caltech, so it’s not impossible that his office is near the other three.
In the episode where Sheldon lent Penny money, he stated he didn’t spend a lot of his income.
True, but that’s different from the point which I was addressing. I do agree that he has a lot of unspent income.
That’s not the original pilot. There is no Penny, Howard, or Raj in the original pilot. There is a slutty chick who needs a place to stay and they let her live in their third bedroom which is off to the left of the set, opposite their bedrooms. She is not played by the actress who plays Penny.
Leonard does donate to the sperm bank and the first scene is him waiting for Sheldon to finish (he didn’t like the “motivational materials” I believe, so it took him longer). They are doing it so they can have money for dinner. And there is a nerd girl Sheldon had sex with while cosplaying as Spock undergoing Pon Farr.
It never aired but it’s on youtube. Some of the dialogue is word for word but they changed a lot when they redid the pilot. The original is pretty cringe-worthy.
Indeed? I didn’t realize. Well then, to Youtube!!! (cue dramatic music)
JPL is administered by Caltech, but its campus is several miles away. (And considerably larger. Caltech is a tiny university.)
I think Sheldon, Leonard and Raj are probably all intended to be postdoctoral fellows (postdocs). Postdocs are actually the people who do most of the work of scientific research these days. They do not have much in the way of teaching duties, and are fairly poorly paid, but although they will be under the supervision of a faculty member (who will control their funding, and be responsible for getting the funding grants), in some cases they may have a fair amount of autonomy over the detailed direction of their research.
Howard is probably meant to be a JPL staff engineer.
Caltech is a very unusual university in that it has more Ph.D. students and postdocs than it does undergraduates. Research is the focus and undergrad teaching is almost an afterthought. What is unrealistic, however, is that Sheldon, Leonard and Raj do not seem to have to supervise, or even interact with, any Ph.D. students. In real life there would be quite a lot of them around, doing the grunt work of research and outnumbering the postdocs probably even at Caltech. (Somebody like Leonard would also almost certainly have a lab tech or two, and several Ph.D. students and other postdocs working with him, but when we see him in his lab he always seems to be alone. The same goes for Raj except that I do not think I have ever seen him at work, except when he was working with/for Sheldon.)
That certainly sounds like the boys, yes. (Except the poorly paid part, for Sheldon - see the earlier reference to his uncashed pay cheques.)
To the OP’s original question, despite the actors’ ages, I think Sheldon’s probably the youngest of the guys, probably closer to Penny’s age - he’s an insanely high level child prodigy, who seems to have gotten his PhD in his mid-teens, so about 10 years before the others, relatively speaking, but he doesn’t seem to have been at the school for that much longer than them, so I’d say he’s probably about 5 years younger. (Could go a bit older if his ‘visiting faculty’ travels went a good long while.)
Right. But in the universe of The Big Bang Theory, it isn’t a gigantic stretch to give Howard (a JPL employee) an office in Caltech.
This is a pretty accurate description of their work life on the show, even including their supervisor Dr. Gablehauser.
Only took two years to catch that one. SCARCE.
the show has a slim thread to reality with which to crack jokes and pick on some stereotypes. so not to take anything too seriously. they’ve spent more time in a cafeteria than i ever did post high school.
though it would be interesting to find the real math equations that appear in sequential episodes transcribed somewhere.
while they could be postdocs in The Benefactor Factor they are expected to be major actors in fund raising.
That makes you the leading SDMB candidate to be Weird Al. :eek:
I think Dr. Gablehauser is the department chair, not a group supervisor.
I read the end of that in Ranjit’s (the chauffeur/cabbie on HIMYM) voice.
Yankovic? He didn’t go to Caltech, at least not according to his Wikipedia page. Or is there some other Weird Al I don’t know about.
Anyway, I may be weird, but I am not an Al.
He’s let it lapse recently, but the guy in charge of keeping the science on the show accurate (including putting all the writing on the whiteboards) used to have a blog here:
Hell, when Penny was born, I had finished college, had a job, been on unemployment, and gotten another job.
And no, you can’t have your walker back.
I am getting ready to trace a circuit with a fluke meter that is older than Penny.
i recently went (went back) there. the archives start with s02e23. it is a good site.
elsewhere i saw mention of the equation sequence starting in season 1. i don’t find how long the step wise sequencing went or any info on seasons 1 and 2 equations.
i don’t think this was meant to be a real academic class via the university but rather shelden has so many personal rules to abide by that if you make infractions, he has a home-made class complete with syllabus and lectures to educate you on the do’s and don’ts of shelden cooper.
Seeing this I recognize a :smack: ( I didn’t recognize the error last nite) I just remembered he went to Poly.