Sheldon gets much ridicule for being a dick (and he is), but he’s right about a lot of everyday stuff. I was at a thrift store today and was looking at a really nice used sofa, but thought about bedbugs and remembered that episode of TBBT when he was convinced that Penny’s castoff chair was crawling with bugs.
Well, Sheldon was right. I’d never bring home used furniture nowadays because of bedbug risk.
So Sheldon’s right about these things:
Assume used furniture is buggy.
Don’t keep bread in the fridge - it gets stale even faster.
I could be wrong, but I believe the rule is that Texas chili doesn’t have beans in it while Mexican chili does. Sheldon is from Texas and his Don’t Mess With Texas attitude shows up once in a while in oddly randoms spots.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like beans in my chili, I’m just saying that wasn’t hard and fast rule, that’s Sheldon being Sheldon.
Chili with beans is fine. The beans are absolutely not the problem with chili that doesn’t live up to its potential. Although most of the best chili doesn’t have beans, some of the very best, does.
That should be a thread all it’s own, however.
Sheldon is right about a lot of things, but he’s often wrong about why he’s right.
One area where he’s right about being right is religious fundamentalism. Another: child rearing (when it’s personal to him - I imagine he’s said some pretty egregious stuff about the topic in an abstract way).
(No, Sheldon is a string theory fan, it’s Leslie Winkle that’s the Loop Quantum Gravity proponent).
Sheldon is right about sleeping with your head away from a door.
No, he is not. String theory is his area of research but he can’t stand it because he doesn’t believe that it is the right path. He tried to defect from it but the university forced him to continue with that line of research rather than the ones he favors because of grant money and simply because that is what he was hired to do. That part of the show is oddly accurate about academia in ways that no other show ever has been.
Odd. That part struck me as almost ludicrously inaccurate about academia. It might be true that it would be made very difficult for someone running a large experimental grant-supported research program to change theoretical direction in mid stream. Sheldon is a pure theorist, however, and I doubt whether work like his attracts grants at all, given its complete lack of foreseeable practical application. Even if it did, I doubt whether they would constrain his theoretical direction. No deep-pocketed institution has a financial stake in string theory (or LQG, or any similar theoretical position). The only real expense of someone like Sheldon (apart from standard overheads like journals at the library, office space, and his salary) is going to be an occasional need for supercomputer time. It is pointless and counterproductive for a university, or anyone, to try to control the theoretical views and direction of a theoretican, and I do not believe they would try to. The very value of such a person is that they know their field far better than any outsider does, and are thus best placed to judge which directions are likely to be fruitful.
As for string theory versus loop quantum gravity, Sheldon has been a committed string theorist for almost the whole run of the show, and was often taunted about it by Lesley Winkel, who favored loop quantum gravity. His disillusionment with string theory has been a very late development, and I do not believe it involved a shift to a commitment to LQG. (Although as I now view the show in Britain, I may be a bit behind the latest developments in America. Here, the show where he became disillusioned with string theory first went out just a week and a half ago, and there has not been a new episode since.)
OK, I remembered there being a fundamental divide between Leonard and Lesley on the quantum gravity topic, but I guess I misremembered which side Sheldon fell on (mostly through assuming that he would never admit to agreeing with Leonard on anything).
It’s some time since I watched it, so I just watched the final episode once again: Sheldon wanted to switch to something call Inflationary Cosmology, but was as said refused. So he is off riding the rails like a hobo to clear his thoughts.
Leonard refused to commit either way. He told Lesley that there were strengths and weaknesses to both theories. She stormed out because she couldn’t imagine raising a child with someone who fails to worship at her chosen altar.