David Saltzberg

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David Saltzberg (* 1967 ) is an American astrophysicist . He teaches as professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). From 2007 to 2019 was Saltzberg scientific consultant for CBS - sitcom The Big Bang Theory . He was also a consultant for the television series Manhattan and The Leftovers .

Scientific career

Saltzberg received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1989 , where he worked at the Princeton Cyclotron , and his Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Chicago. After a post doc at CERN in Geneva, he moved to the University of California in Los Angeles in 1997, where he has been teaching physics and astronomy ever since.

His research areas at UCLA are Radio Detection of Cosmic Neutrinos and High-Energy Collider Physics (= physics with the highest-energy particle accelerators).

Awards

Saltzberg won the Sloan Research Fellowship , the National Science Foundation Career Award, and the Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator Award while serving as Assistant Professor . The asteroid 8628 Davidsaltzberg was named after him.

"The Big Bang Theory"

Whiteboard in Sheldon Cooper's apartment

Even in the preparatory phase of the series, which first aired in the USA in 2007, CBS brought in David Saltzberg as a consultant. His tasks include reading the scripts, in which he checks whether everything that relates to physical phenomena - including incidental comments from the actors - stands up to scientific scrutiny. He is present at every shoot and occasionally advises the actors on the diction of their texts.

For topics that do not fall within his own specialist area, he consults colleagues at universities in advance, who check whether the content is correct or provide information on how technical terms and author names are correctly pronounced. In the field of bio- and neurosciences, he is supported by Mayim Bialik , who is a doctor of neuroscience . One of his main tasks is to write on the whiteboards in Sheldon's apartment with mathematical and physical formulas, for which he uses different sources. In the meantime colleagues email him their latest results and suggest formulas for the whiteboards.

In 2016 the Young Academy of Sweden honored David Saltzberg, Steve Molaro, Bill Prady and Chuck Lorre for 'The Big Bang Theory' with the Torsten Wiesel Midnight Sun Award for Distinguished Achievement in Promoting Science .

Quotes

“When you see a dialogue scene on TV it seems so simple, and you don't notice that there are dozens of professionals working in the background to get this done. A lecture, on the other hand, is a simple performance. You become a bit more modest. "

" Producing a comedy isn't really that different from a science experiment: at the end of the day it works or it doesn't."

“My scientific publications read a dozen or so people at most, but Big Bang Theory is viewed 20 million in the US alone. That has more implications than anything else I'll ever tackle. "

literature

  • George Beahm: Unrevealing the Mysteries of The Big Bang Theory. An Unabashedly Unauthorized TV Show Companion . Dallas, TX: Smart Pop 2004. ISBN 978-1-941631-13-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ UCLA, Saltzberg's Current and Recent Research , accessed on August 14, 2018th
  2. ↑ David Saltzberg Alchetron, accessed on August 14, 2019
  3. ↑ Alphabetical list of asteroids / D
  4. ^ Nadia Whitehead: What's It Like to Consult for The Big Bang Theory? In: Science , April 30, 2014, accessed August 15, 2018.
  5. ↑ The Torsten Wiesel Midnight Sun Award to The Big Bang Theory Sverige Unga Akademi, April 12, 2016, accessed on August 10, 2018.
  6. ↑ Quoted from: Daniel Haas: Behind the scenes, a physics professor does the fact check. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine. University gazette. January 22, 2013 [1] , accessed August 14, 2018
  7. ^ 'Creating comedy is not that different from experimental science. At the end of the day, it either works or it doesn't. ' Quoted from: Neda Ulaby: The Man Who Gets The Science Right On 'The Big Bang Theory'. Interview with David Saltzberg. Pop culture happy hour, 23 September 2013, accessed on 14 August 2018
  8. ↑ Désirée Karge: What Hollywood researchers are hiring for, Wissenschaft.de, July 15, 2014, [2] accessed on August 14, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Saltzberg, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1967