The Big Bang Theory, Season 11, Episode 2 (October 2, 2017) -- "The Retraction Reaction"

[notfrommensa]

Did we see Bernadette in last week’s episode, other than just a head shot, when she told Howard she was pregnant?

[ivylass]

Oh, dear, she had a miscarriage. I wonder if they wrote her pregnancy into last season and had to carry on with it after she lost the baby?

[Dewey_Finn]

As I read that article from Glamour, I get the impression the miscarriage was during a previous pregnancy, not the current one.

[Quimby]

I am curious if there is really is some kind of existential crisis in theoretical physics that this episode was playing off of or was it all just a joke for the show?

[muldoonthief]

@Dewey_Finn

As I read that article from Glamour, I get the impression the miscarriage was during a previous pregnancy, not the current one.

Yeah, that’s clear, especially since the article is from July. It’s a really good article though. It never occurred to me that the term “miscarriage” is an artifact of the patriarchy.

[ivylass]

@Dewey_Finn

As I read that article from Glamour, I get the impression the miscarriage was during a previous pregnancy, not the current one.

Right. But she had a baby on the show last year. I wonder if they wrote the pregnancy for Halley into the show because Melissa was really pregnant, then had to keep going on when she lost it.

[Kent_Clark]

@Dewey_Finn

Yes, that was a little weird. In the real world, people don’t usually move from a staff position like HR to an academic position like dean. It seems to be sloppy writing. They could instead have made her something like a VP of public relations or media relations or some such thing.

In the real world, staff nurses don’t usually get transferred from a sperm bank to the emergency room to maternity to an in-patient ward where they take care of Sheldon’s barber, either.

Sometimes it’s better just to sit back and enjoy the show.

[Kamino_Neko]

They got the colour of Romulan Ale right, which goes a long way on the ‘accuracy’ scale.

[silenus]

Looked like the right kind of bottle, too.

[DSeid]

@Quimby

I am curious if there is really is some kind of existential crisis in theoretical physics that this episode was playing off of or was it all just a joke for the show?

My understanding is there, to no small extent, is. As the LHC went on line the fear of many in the field was that it would find the Higgs and nothing else.

@Science 23 Mar 2007

… Many particle physicists say their greatest fear is that their grand new machine—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland—will spot the Higgs boson and nothing else. If so, particle physics could grind to halt, they say. In fact, if the LHC doesn’t reveal a plethora of new particles in addition to the Higgs, many say they would rather it see nothing new at all.

That may seem perverse, but put yourself again in the shoes of a particle physicist. In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers hammered out a theory called the standard model that, in spite of leaving out gravity and suffering from other shortcomings, has explained everything seen in collider experiments ever since and left physicists with few clues to a deeper theory. At the energies the LHC will reach, the standard model goes haywire, spitting out negative probabilities and other nonsense. So the collider has to cough up something new, researchers say. If it spits out only the Higgs, however, the new golden age of discovery could end as soon as it begins.

If the lone Higgs has just the right mass—about 190 times the mass of a proton—it would tie up the standard model’s loose ends and leave physicists even more thoroughly stymied than before, says Jonathan Ellis, a theorist at CERN. “This would be the real five-star disaster,” he says, “because that would mean there wouldn’t need to be any new physics all the way up to the Planck scale,” the mind-bogglingly high energy at which gravity pulls as hard as the other forces of nature. The Higgs alone could essentially mark a dissatisfying end to the ages-long quest into the essence of matter. …

And while there have been other particles identified by the LHC they seem to be like endgame plays. And my impression is that to those in the field that is both boring and a bit disheartening. See Hawkings’ comment for example.

[Kamino_Neko]

@silenus

Looked like the right kind of bottle, too.

Yes, yes it was.

[Fair_Rarity]

My mother was showing that much when she was pregnant with my brother. I was wearing maternity clothes when I was pregnant for just a month or two. Some people grow fast, some slow, some a lot, some a little. It’s unusual, but within the bounds of normal. Plus she’s tiny.

I liked the conversation between her and Amy until they got pissed at each other. I should have known women can’t be friends and celebrate success at the same time in this universe.

[Andy_L]

@Biggirl

I was mad at it all the way through! The LHC very quickly did (one of the things) it was built for, discover Higgs boson and has detected hadrons. Stupid show making me angry. I’ll watch it later to see if it was funny because I spent the whole show complaining to my husband and yelling at my TV.

The hope is always that the LHC will find something not predicted by the Standard Model: something startling, or something that distinguishes between various proposed extensions of the Standard Model. Discovering predicted things is very nice - but it’s not necessarily exciting for someone who is eager for the next big thing.

@RivkahChaya

Yeah, she’s showing a lot for 3.5 months.

Women who are not very tall can appear further along than they really are, in my experience.

@Fair_Rarity

I liked the conversation between her and Amy until they got pissed at each other. I should have known women can’t be friends and celebrate success at the same time in this universe.

They were reflecting the typical arguments between Sheldon and Howard though (and considerably more politely even at the end than those two are).