What kind of guidance system is it? I can get past the laugh track because i like the characters even though i think there are a lot of female comic nerds and gamers, ok im past that but wtf is this invention? It remind me when south park was good mr garrison invented the gyroscope car to put the airlines out of business hehe, but seriously. Wtf is this invention?
shareIt's probably just techno-babble fiction that misuses a few real concepts.
I've always been peeved about the lack of study on the part of the writers when they had Sheldon repeat the misunderstood adage that a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable.
It doesn't take much checking to understand. "Fruit" is used in two different contexts: In a botanical context (all plants) and in a culinary context (food).
In botany, a plant's fruit is a fleshy seed-bearing pod. The fleshy part is intended as food for the seeds. Botanically, even a cucumber is a fruit of its source plant, just like every vegetable that is a fleshy seed-bearing pod. In botany, the word "vegetable" is meaningless. Mushrooms are fungi, corn is a grain, celery is a stalk, potato and carrot are roots, etc etc etc.
In a culinary sense, a fruit is defined as a sweet-tasting plant generally used in desserts, and a vegetable is a non-sweet plant generally used in a main course. Those two words are ALL about usage in food. Of course this "general" usage isn't set in stone, due to things like carrot cake, zucchini bread, waldorf salad with apples and grapes/raisins in it, orange chicken, or making sweet corn syrup from corn.
Most botanically defined fruits do indeed carry a lot of sugar, as it's a good energy source, so the confusion starts to set in at that point.
So botanically, yes a tomato is the fruit of its vine, which is used in the culinary world as a vegetable. Since Sheldon was in a grocery store, and not shopping for live plants at a plant shop, he was INCORRECT. A tomato is indeed a food vegetable due to how it's used, and the fact that it is not sweet to the taste (sun-dried tomatoes can be argued to cross over into culinary fruit usage, and yes the same plant part can indeed be used in the culinary world as either a fruit or a vegetable, depending on taste and sugar concentration -- pumpkin is a great example too).
Now if we had two different terms, like "seed bearing fleshy pod" for botany and "sweet tasting plant" for the culinary world, the difference between the two would be more obvious.
I want credit in my biology class for reading that post.
shareThere were also two other times I noticed inaccuracies on the show. I'll post both in two posts.
1. When Penny is having ex-boyfriend issues, and Leonard is considering asking her out, Sheldon brings up the "Schrodinger's Cat" story and calls it an "experiment." It was never meant to be an experiment. Schrodinger described the cat scenario as a way to mock the way quantum mechanics was being applied by his peers. An actual physicist, like Sheldon and also Leonard (who calls Sheldon's reference to the cat "brilliant") should KNOW the reality behind this cat scenario.
Even the Wikipedia page makes it clear: Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics. The mockery is also quite easily ascertained by reading Schrodinger's actual written version of the scenario, and Einstein's response, both of which are on the Wikipedia page.
Here's the second one (these got too long for one post):
2. Leonard goes out with Penny early on in the show, on a fake date, and shows her a trick where he picks up an olive using an empty glass, without him touching the olive. He does so by moving the inverted glass above the olive in a circular motion, which gets the olive rolling along the inside of the glass, and then he lifts it off the table.
Penny smartly responds "Oh, centrifugal force," which Leonard should have simply agreed with. INSTEAD, Leonard NEEDLESSLY "corrects" her by saying it's "actually" centripetal force exerted by the glass. This "correction" is insulting and insipid, as she was completely right: The olive was INDEED undergoing centrifugal force, and yes the glass is exerting centripetal force on the olive. Centrifugal and centripetal forces happen SIMULTANEOUSLY, there is no reason for Leonard to shoot down Penny's accurate observation!!! Especially when he's trying to woo her! A real physicist would know that there's no correction to be made.
It's like doing this: You ask someone what force is causing them to stand on the Earth without flying off. They respond "gravity," which is correct. Then you say "NO YOU'RE WRONG, IT'S MOLECULAR RESISTANCE FROM THE GROUND THAT IS PUSHING UP AGAINST YOUR WEIGHT. WITHOUT THAT YOU'D BE FALLING FOREVER, DUHHH."
That kind of correction is exactly the same, and exactly as stupid. Gravity and resistance obviously go into play simultaneously when you're standing on the ground.
As a real physicist, I find these kinds of easily-fixed goofs to be weaknesses in the show's attempts at being intelligent to a nerdy degree. It's still a great show, though, and MOST of the time it's quite smart.