The passing of stars

Birth, death, and afterlife in the universe


Keith S. Taber


stars are born, start young, live, sometimes living alone but sometimes not, sometimes have complicated lives, have lifetimes, reach the end of their lives, and die, so, becoming dead, eventually long dead; and, indeed, there are generations of stars with life cycles


One of the themes I keep coming back to here is the challenge of communicating abstract scientific ideas. Presenting science in formal technical language will fail to engage most general audiences, and will not support developing understanding if the listener/reader cannot make good sense of the presentation. But, if we oversimplify, or rely on figures of speech (such as metaphors) in place of formal treatments of concepts, then – even if the audience does engage and make sense of the presentation – audience members will be left with a deficient account.

Does that matter? Well, often a level of understanding that provides some insight into the science is far better than the impression that science is so far detached from everyday experience that it is not for most people.

And the context matters.

Public engagement with science versus science education

In the case of a scientist asked to give a public talk, or being interviewed for news media, there seems a sensible compromise. If people come away from the presentation thinking they have heard about something interesting, that seems in some way relevant to them, and that they understood the scientist's key messages, then this is a win – even if it is only a shift to an over-simplified account, or an understanding in terms of a loose analogy. (Perhaps some people will want to learn more – but, even if not, surely this meets some useful success criterion?)

In this regard science teachers have a more difficult job to do. 1 The teacher is not usually considered successful just because the learners think they have understood teaching, but rather only when the learners can demonstrate that what they have learnt matches a specified account set out as target knowledge in the curriculum. This certainly does not mean a teacher cannot (or should not) use simplification and figures of speech and so forth – this is often essential – but rather that such such moves can usually only be seen as starting points in moving learners onto temporary 'stepping stones' towards creditable knowledge that will eventually lead to test responses that will be marked correct.


An episode of 'In Our Time' on 'The Death of Stars'
"The image above is of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, approximately 10,000 light years away, from a once massive star that died in a supernova explosion that was first seen from Earth in 1690"

The Death of Stars

With this in mind, I was fascinated by an episode of the BBC's radio show, 'In Our Time' which took as its theme the death of stars. Clearly, this falls in the category of scientists presenting to a general public audience, not formal teaching, and that needs to be borne in mind as I discuss (and perhaps even gently 'deconstruct') some aspects of the presentation from the perspective of a science educator.

The show was broadcast some months ago, but I made a note to revisit it because I felt it was so rich in material for discussion, and I've just re-listened. I thought this was a fascinating programme, and I think it is well worth a listen, as the programme description suggests:

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the abrupt transformation of stars after shining brightly for millions or billions of years, once they lack the fuel to counter the force of gravity. Those like our own star, the Sun, become red giants, expanding outwards and consuming nearby planets, only to collapse into dense white dwarves. The massive stars, up to fifty times the mass of the Sun, burst into supernovas, visible from Earth in daytime, and become incredibly dense neutron stars or black holes. In these moments of collapse, the intense heat and pressure can create all the known elements to form gases and dust which may eventually combine to form new stars, new planets and, as on Earth, new life."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0018128

I was especially impressed by the Astronomer Royal, Professor Martin Rees (and not just because he is a Cambridge colleague) who at several points emphasised that what was being presented was current understanding, based on our present theories, with the implication that this was open to being revisited in the light (sic) of new evidence. This made a refreshing contrast to the common tendency in some popular science programmes to present science as 'proven' and so 'certain' knowledge. That tendency is an easy simplification that distorts both the nature and excitement of science.

Read about scientific certainty in the media

Presenter Melvyn Bragg's other guests were Carolin Crawford (Emeritus Member of the Institute of Astronomy, and Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge) and Mark Sullivan (Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Southampton).

Public science communication as making the unfamiliar familiar

Science communicators, whether professional journalists or scientists popularising their work, face similar challenges to science teachers in getting across often complex and abstract ideas; and, like them, need to make the unfamiliar familiar. Science teachers are taught about how they need to connect new material with the learners' prior knowledge and experiences if it is to make sense to the students. But successful broadcasters and popularisers also know they need to do this, using such tactics as simplification, modelling, metaphor and simile, analogy, teleology, anthropomorphism and narrative.

There were quite a few examples of the speakers seeking to make abstract ideas accessible to listeners in such ways in this programme. However, perhaps the most common trope was one set up by the episode title, and one which could very easily slip under radar (so to speak). In this piece I examine the seemingly ubiquitous metaphor (if, indeed, it is to be considered a metaphor!) of stars being alive; in a sequel I discuss some of the wide range of other figures of speech adopted in this one science programme.

Science: making the familiar, unfamiliar?

If when working as a teacher I saw a major part of my work as making the unfamiliar familiar to learners, in my research there was a sense in which I needed to make the familiar unfamiliar. Often, the researcher needs to focus afresh on the commonly 'taken-for-granted' and to start to enquire into it as if one does not already know about it. That is, one needs to problematise the common-place. (This reflects a process sometimes referred to as 'bracketing'.)

To give one obvious example. Why do some students do well in science tests and others less well? Obviously, because some learners are better science students than others! (Clearly in some sense this is true – but is it just a tautology? 2) But one clearly needs to dig into this truism in more detail to uncover any insights that would actually be useful in supporting students and improving teaching!

The same approach applies in science. We do not settle for tautologies such as fire burns because fire is the process of burning, or acids are corrosive because acids are the category of substances which corrode; nor what are in effect indirect disguised tautologies such as heavy objects fall because they are largely composed of the element earth, where earth is the element whose natural place is at the centre of the world. (If that seems a silly example, it was the widely accepted wisdom for many centuries. Of course, today, we do not recognise 'earth' as a chemical element.)

I mention this, because I would like to invite readers to share with me in making the familiar unfamiliar here – otherwise you could easily miss my point.

"so much in the Universe, and much of our understanding of it, depends on changes in stars as they die after millions or billions of stable years"

Tag line for 'the Death of Stars'

The lives of stars

The episode opens with

"Hello. Across the universe, stars have been dying for millions of years…

Melvyn Bragg introducing the episode

The programme was about the death of stars – which directly implies stars die, and, so, also suggests that – before dying – they live. And there were plenty of references in the programme to reinforce this notion. Carolin Crawford suggested,

"So, essentially, a star's life, it can exist as a star, for as long as it has enough fuel at the right temperature at the right density in the core of the star to stall the gravitational collapse. And it is when it runs out of its fuel at the core, that's when you reach the end of its lifetime and we start going through the death processes."

Prof. Carolin Crawford talking on 'In Our Time'

Not only only do stars have lives, but some have much longer lives than others,

"…more massive stars can … build quite heavy elements at their cores through their lifetimes. And … they actually have shorter lifetimes – it is counter-intuitive, but they have to chomp through their fuel supply so furiously that they exhaust it more rapidly. So, the mass of the star dictates what happens in the core, what you create in the core, and it also determines the lifetime of the star."

"The mass of the star…determines the lifetime of the star….
our sun…we reckon it is about halfway through its lifetime, so stars like the sun have lifetimes of 10 billions years or so…"


Prof. Carolin Crawford talking on 'In Our Time'

This was not some idiosyncratic way that Professor Crawford had of discussing stars, as Melvyn's other guests also used this language. Here are some examples I noted:

  • "this is a dead, dense star" (Martin Rees)
  • "the lifetime of a stable star, we can infer the … life cycles of stars" (Martin Rees)
  • "stars which lived and died before our solar system formed…stars which have more complicated lives" (Martin Rees)
  • "those old stars" (Martin Rees)
  • "earlier generations of massive stars which had lived and died …those long dead stars" (Martin Rees)
  • "it is an old dead star" (Mark Sullivan)
  • "our sun…lives by itself in space. But most stars in the universe don't live by themselves…" (Mark Sullivan)
  • "two stars orbiting each other…are probably born with different masses" (Mark Sullivan)
  • "when [stars] die" (Mark Sullivan)
  • "when [galaxies] were very young" (Martin Rees)
  • "stars that reach the end point of their lives" (Carolin Crawford )
  • "a star that's younger" (Martin Rees)

So, in the language of astronomy, stars are born, start young, live; sometimes living alone but sometimes not, sometimes have complicated lives; have lifetimes, reach the end of their lives, and die, so, becoming dead, eventually long dead; and, indeed, there are generations of stars with life cycles.


The processes that support a star's luminosity come to an end: but does the star therefore die?

(Cover art for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's recording of David Bedford's composition Star's End. Photographer: Monique Froese)


Are stars really alive?

Presumably, the use of such terms in this context must have originally been metaphorical. Life (and so death) has a complex but well-established and much-discussed meaning in science. Living organisms have certain necessary characteristics – nutrition, (inherent) movement, irritability/sensitivity, growth, reproduction, respiration, and excretion, or some variation on such a list. Stars do not meet this criterion. 3 Living organisms maintain a level of complex organisation by making use of energy stores that allow them to decrease entropy internally at the cost of entropy increase elsewhere.

Animals and decomposers (such as fungi) take in material that can be processed to support their metabolism and then the 'lower quality' products are eliminated. Photosynthetic organisms such as green plants have similar metabolic processes, but preface these by using the energy 'in' sunlight to first facilitate endothermic reactions that allow them to build up the material used later for their mortal imperative of working against the tendencies of entropy. Put simply, plants synthesise sugar (from carbon dioxide and water) that they can distribute to all their cells to support the rest of the metabolism (a complication that is a common source of alternative conceptions {misconceptions} to learners 4).

By contrast, generally speaking, during their 'lifetimes', stars only gain and lose marginal amounts of material (compared with a 70 kg human being that might well consume a tonne of food each year) – and do not have any quality control mechanism that would lead to them taking in what is more useful and expelling what is not.

As far as life on earth is concerned, virtually all of that complex organisation of living things depends upon the sun as a source of energy, and relies on the process by which the sun increases the universe's entropy by radiating energy from a relatively compact source into the diffuse vastness of space. 4 In other words, if anything, a star like our sun better reflects a dead being such as a felled tree or a zebra hunted down by a lion, providing a source of concentrated energy for other organisms feeding on its mortal remains!

Are the lives and deaths of stars simply pedagogical devices?

So, are stars really alive? Or is this just one example of the kind of rhetorical device I referred to above being adopted to help make the abstract unfamiliar becomes familiar? Is it the use of a familiar trope employed simply to aid in the communication of difficult ideas? Is this just a metaphor? That is,

  • Do stars actually die, or…
  • are they only figuratively alive and, so, only suffer (sic) a metaphorical death?

I do not think the examples I quote above represent a concerted targeted strategy by Professors Crawford, Rees and Sullivan to work with a common teaching metaphor for the sake of Melvyn and his listeners: but rather the actual language commonly used in the field. That is, the life cycles and lifetimes of stars have entered into the technical lexicon of the the science. If so, then stars do actually live and die, at least in terms of what those words now mean in the discipline of astronomy.

Gustav Strömberg referred to "the whole lifetime of a star" in a paper in the The Astrophysical Journal as long ago as 1927. He did not feel the need to explain the term so presumably it was already in use – or considered obvious. Kip Thorne published a paper in 1965 about 'Gravitational Collapse and the Death of a Star". In the first paragraph he pointed out that

"The time required for a star to consume its nuclear fuel is so long (many billions of years in most cases) that only a few stars die in our galaxy per century; and the evolution of a star from the end point of thermonuclear burning to its final dead state is so rapid that its death throes are observable for only a few years."

Thorne, 1965, p.1671

Again, the terminology die/death/dead is used without introduction or explanation.

He went on to refer to

  • deaths of stars
  • different types of death
  • final resting states

before shifting to what a layperson would recognise as a more specialist, technical, lexicon (zero point kinetic energy; Compton wavelength of an electron; neutron-rich nuclei; photodistintegration; gravitational potential energy; degenerate Fermi gas; lambda hyperons; the general relativity equation of hydrostatic equilibrium; etc.), before reiterating that he had been offering

"the story of the death of a star as predicted by a combination of nuclear theory, elementary particle theory, and general relativity"

Thorne, 1965, p.1678

So, this was a narrative, but one intended to be fit for a professional scientific audience. It seems the lives and deaths of stars have been part of the technical vocabulary of astronomers for a long time now.

When did scientists imbue stars with life?

Modern astronomy is quite distinct from astrology, but like other sciences astronomy developed from earlier traditions and at one time astronomy and astrology were not so discrete (an astronomical 'star' such as Johannes Kepler was happy to prepare horoscopes for paying customers) and mythological and religious aspects of thinking about the 'heavens' were not so well compartmentalised from what we would today consider as properly the realm of the scientific.

In Egyptian religion, Ra was both a creative force and identified with the sun. Mythology is full of origin stories explaining how the stars had been cast there after various misadventures on earth (the Greek myths but also in other traditions such as those of the indigenous North American and Australian peoples 5) and we still refer to examples such as the seven sisters and Orion with the sword hanging in his belt. The planets were associated with different gods – Venus (goddess of love), Mars (the god of war), Mercury (the messenger of the gods), and so on.6 It was traditional to refer to some heavenly bodies as gendered: Luna is she, Sol is he, Venus is she, and so on. This usage is sometimes found in scientific writing on astronomy.

Read about examples of personification in scientific writing

Yet this type of poetic license seems unlikely to explain the language of the life cycles of stars, even if there are parallels between scientific and poetic or spiritual accounts,

Stars are celestial objects having their own life cycles. Stars are born, grow up, mature and eventually die. …The author employs inductive and deductive analysis of the verses of the Quran and the Hadith texts related with the life and death of stars. The results show that the life and death of the stars from Islamic and Modern astronomy has some similarities and differences.

Wahab, 2015

After all, the heavenly host of mythology comprised of immortals, if sometimes starting out as mortals subsequently given a kind of immorality by the Gods when being made into stars. Indeed the classical tradition supported by interpretation of Christian orthodoxy was that unlike the mundane things of earth, the heavens were not subject to change and decay – anything from the moon outwards was perfect and unchanging. (This notion was held onto by some long after it was established that comets with their varying paths were not atmospheric phenomena – indeed well into the twentieth century some young earth creationists were still insisting in the perfect, unchanging nature of the heavens. 7)

So, presumably, we need to look elsewhere to find how science adopted life cycles for stars.

A natural metaphor?

Earlier in this piece I asked readers to bear with me, and to join with me in making the familiar unfamiliar, to 'bracket' the familiar notion that we say starts are born, live and later die, and to problematise it. In one scientific sense stars cannot die – as they were never alive. Yet, I accept this seems a pretty natural metaphor to use. Or, at least, it seems a natural metaphor to those who are used to hearing and reading it. A science teacher may be familiar with the trope of stars being born, living, and dying – but how might a young learner, new to astronomical ideas, make sense of what was meant?

Now, there is a candidate project for anyone looking for a topic for a student research assignment: how would people who have never previously been exposed to this metaphor respond to the kinds of references I've discussed above? I would genuinely like to know what 'naive' people would make of this 8 – would they just 'get' the references immediately (appreciate in what sense stars are born, live, and die); or, would it seem a bizarre way of talking about stars? Given how readily people accept and take up anthropomorphic references to molecules and viruses and electrons and so forth, I find the question intriguing.

Read about anthropomorphism in science

What makes a star alive or dead?

Even if for the disciplinary experts the language of living stars and their life cycles has become a 'dead metaphor 'and is now taken (i.e., taken for granted) as technical terminology – the novice learner, or lay member of the public listening to a radio show, still has to make sense of what it means to say a star is born, or is alive, or is nearing the end of its life, or is dead.

The critical feature discussed by Professors Crawford, Rees and Sullivan concerns an equilibrium that allow a star to exist in a balance between the gravitational attraction of its component matter and the pressure generated through its nuclear reactions.

A star forms when material comes together under its mutual gravitational attraction – and as the material becomes denser it gets hotter. Eventually a sufficient density and temperature is reached such that there is 'ignition' – not in the sense of chemical combustion, but self-sustaining nuclear processes occur, generating heat. This point of ignition is the 'birth' of the star.

Fusion processes continue as long as there is sufficient fissionable material, the 'fuel' that 'feeds' the nuclear 'furnace' (initially hydrogen, but depending on the mass of the star there can be a series of reactions with products from one stage undergoing further fusion to form even heavier elements). The life time of the star is the length of time that such processes continue.

Eventually there will not be sufficient 'fuel' to maintain the level of 'burning' that is needed to allow the ball of material to avoid ('resist') gravitational collapse. There are various specific scenarios, but this is the 'death' of the star. It may be a supernova offering very visible 'death throes'.

The core that is left after this collapse is a 'dead' star, even if it is hot enough to continue being detectable for some time (just as it takes time for the body of a homeothermic animal that dies to cool to the ambient temperature).

It seems then that there is a kind of analogy at work here.

Organisms are alive as long as they continue to metabolise sufficiently in order to maintain their organisation in the face of the entropic tendency towards disintegration and dispersal.Stars are alive as long as they exhibit sufficient fusion processes to maintain them as balls of material that have much greater volumes, and lower densities than the gravitational forces on their component particles would otherwise lead to.

It is clearly an imperfect analogy.

Organisms base metabolism on a through-put of material to process (and in a sense 'harvest' energy sources).Stars do acquire new materials and eject some, but this is largely incidental and it is essentially the mass of fissionable material that originally comes together to initiate fusion which is 'harvested' as the energy source.
Organisms may die if they cannot access external food sources, but some die of built-in senescence and others (those that reproduce by dividing) are effectively immortal.

We (humans) die because the amazing self-constructing and self-repairing abilities of our bodies are not perfect, and somatic cells cannot divide indefinitely to replace no longer viable cells.
Stars 'die' because they run out of their inherent 'fuel'.

Stars die when the hydrogen that came together to form them has substantially been processed.

Read about analogy in science

One person's dead star is another person's living metaphor

So, do stars die? Yes, because astronomers (the experts on stars) say they do, and it seems they are not simply talking down to the rest of us. The birth and death of stars seems to be based on an analogy: an analogy which is implicit in some of the detailed discussion of star life cycles. However, through the habitual use of this analogy, terms such as the birth, lifetimes, and death of stars have been adopted into mainstream astronomical discourse as unmarked (taken-for-granted) language such that to the uninitiated they are experienced as metaphors.

And these perspectival metaphors 9 become extended to describe stars that are considered young, old, dying, long dead, and so forth. These terms are used so readily, and so often without a perceived need for qualification or explanation, that we might consider them 'dead' metaphors within astronomical discourse – terms of metaphorical origin but now so habitually used that they have come to be literal (stars are born, they do have lifetimes, they do die). Yet for the uninitiated they are still 'living' metaphors, in the sense that the non-expert needs to work out what it means when a star is said to live or die.

There is a well recognised distinction between live and dead metaphors. But here we have dead-to-the-specialists metaphors that would surely seem to be non-literal to the uninitiated. These terms are not explained by experts as they are taken by them as literal, but they cannot be understood literally by the novice, for whom they are still metaphors requiring interpretation. That is, they are perspectival metaphors zombie words that may seem alive or dead (as figures of speech) according to audience, and so may be treated as dead in professional discourse, but may need to be made undead when used in communicating to the public.


Other aspects of the In Our Time discussion of 'The death of stars' are explored as The complicated social lives of stars: stealing, escaping, and blowing-off in space


Sources cited:
  • Strömberg, G. (1927). The Motions of Giant M Stars. The Astrophysical Journal, 65, 238.
  • Thorne, K. S. (1965). Gravitational Collapse and the Death of a Star. Science, 150(3704), 1671-1679. http://www.jstor.org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/stable/1717408
  • Wahab, R. A. (2015). Life and death of stars: an analysis from Islamic and modern astronomy perspectives. International Proceedings of Economics Development and Research, 83, 89.

Notes

1 In this regard, but not in all regards. As I have suggested here before, the teacher usually has two advantages:

a) generally, a class has a limited spread in terms of the audience background: even a mixed ability class is usually from a single school year (grade level) whereas the public presentation may be addressing a mixed audience of all ages and levels of education.

b) usually a teacher knows the class, and so knows something about their starting points, and their interests


2 Some students do well in science tests and others less well.

If we say this is because

  • some learners are better science students than others
  • and settle for defining better science students as those who achieve good results in formal science tests (that is tests as currently administered, based on the present curriculum, taught in our usual way)

then we are simply 'explaining' the explicandum (i.e., some students do better on science tests that others) by a rephrasing of what is to be explained (some students are better science students: that is, they perform well in science tests!)

Read about tautology


3 Criterion (singular) as a living organism has to satisfy the entries in the list collectively. Each entry is of itself a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.


4 A simple misunderstanding is that animals respire but plants photosynthesise.

In a plant in a steady state, the rates of build-up and break down of sugars would be balanced. However, plants must photosynthesise more than they respire overall in order to to grow and ultimately to allow consumers to make use of them as food. (This needs to be seen at a system level – the plant is clearly not in any inherent sense photosynthesising to provide food for other organisms, but has evolved to be a suitable nutrition source as it transpires [no pun intended] that increases the fitness of plants within the wider ecosystem.)

A more subtle alternative conception is that plants photosynthesise during the day when they are illuminated by sunlight (fair enough) and then use the sugar produced to respire at night when the sun is not available as a source of energy. See, for example, 'Plants mainly respire at night because they are photosynthesising during the day'.

Actually cellular processes require continuous respiration (as even in the daytime sunlight cannot directly power cellular metabolism, only facilitate photosynthesis to produce the glucose that that can be oxidised in respiration).

Schematic reflection of the balance between how photosynthesis generates resources to allow respiration – typically a plant produces tissues that feed other organisms.
The area above the line represents energy from sunlight doing work in synthesising more complex substances. The area below the lines represents work done when the oxidation of those more complex substances provides the energy source for building and maintaining an organism's complex organisation of structure and processes (homoestasis).

5 Museum Victoria offers a pdf that can be downloaded and copied by teachers to teach about how "How the southern night sky is seen by the Boorong clan from north-west Victoria":

'Stories in the Stars – the night sky of the Boorong people' shows the constellations as recognised by this group, the names they were given, and the stories of the people and creatures represented.

(This is largely based on the nineteenth century reports made by William Edward Stanbridge of information given by Boorong informants – see 'Was the stellar burp really a sneeze?')

The illustration shown here is of 'Kulkunbulla' – a constellation that is considered in the U.K. to be only part of the constellation known here as Orion. (Constellations are not actual star groupings, but only what observers have perceived as stars seeming to be grouped together in the sky – the Boorong's mooting of constellations is no more right or wrong than that suggested in any other culture.)


6 The tradition was continued into modern times with the discovery of the planets that came to be named Neptune and Uranus after the Gods of the sea and sky respectively.


7 Creationism, per se, is simply the perspective or belief that the world (i.e., Universe) was created by some creator (God) and so creationism as such is not necessarily in conflict with scientific accounts. The theory of the big bang posits that time, space and matter had a beginning with an uncertain cause which could be seen as God (although some theorists such as Professor Roger Penrose develop theories which posit a sequence of universes that each give rise to the next and that could have infinite extent).

Read about science and religion

Young earth creationists, however, not only believe in a creator God (i.e., they are creationists), but one who created the World no more than about 10 thousand years ago (the earth is young!), rather than over 13 billion years ago. This is clearly highly inconsistent with a wide range of scientific findings and thinking. If the Young Earth Creationists are right, then either

  • a lot of very strongly evidenced science is very, very wrong
  • some natural laws (e.g. radioactive decay rates) that now seem fixed must have changed very substantially since the creation
  • the creator God went to a lot of trouble to set up the natural world to present a highly misleading account of its past history

8 I am not using the term naive here in a discourteous or demeaning way, but in a technical sense of someone who is meeting something for the first time.


9 That is, terms that will appear as metaphors from the perspective of the uninitiated, but now seem literal terms from the perspective of the specialist. We cannot simply say they are or are not metaphors, without asking 'for whom?'


Is the Big Bang Theory mistaken?

Not science fiction, but fictional science


Keith S. Taber


we are made of particles that have existed since the moment the universe began…those atoms travelled 14 billion years through time and space

The Big Bang Theory (but not quite the big bang theory).

What is the Big Bang Theory?

The big bang theory is a theory about the origin and evolution of the universe. Being a theory, it is conjectural, but it is the theory that is largely taken by scientists as our current best available account.

According to big bang theory, the entire universe started in a singularity, a state of infinite density and temperature, in which time space were created as well as matter. As the universe expanded it cooled to its present state – some, about, 13.8 billion years later.


Our current best understanding of the Cosmos is that the entire Universe was formed in a 'big bang'
(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

The term 'big bang' was originally intended as a kind of mockery – a sarcastic description of the notion – but the term was adopted by scientists, and has indeed become widely used in general culture.

Which brings me to 'The Big Bang Theory', which is said to have been the longest ever running sitcom ('situation comedy') – having been in production for longer than even 'Friends'.


The Big Bang Theory: Not science fiction, but fictional science? (Five of these characters have PhDs in science: one 'only' has a master's degree in engineering.)

A situation comedy is set around a situation. The situation was that two Cal Tech physicists are sharing an apartment. Leonard (basically a nice guy, but not very successful with women) is flatmate to Sheldon, a synaesthete, and kind of savant (a device on which to lever much of the humour) – a genius with an encyclopaedic knowledge of most areas of science but a deficient 'theory of mind' such that he lacks

  • insight into others, and so also
  • empathy, and
  • the ability to tell when people are using humour or being sarcastic to him.

If most physicists were like Sheldon we could understand why the big bang theory is still called the big bang theory even though the term was intended to be facetious. The show writers claim that Sheldon was not deliberately written to be on the autistic spectrum, but he tends to take statements literally: when it is suggested that he is crazy, he responds that he knows he is not as his mother had him tested as a child.


Sheldon (at right, partially in shot) has been widely recognised by viewers as showing signs of high-functioning Autism or Aspergers syndrome. (Still from The Big Bang Theory)

These guys hang out with Raj (Rajesh), an astrophysicist and Cambridge graduate so shy he is unable to speak to women, or indeed in their presence (presumably not a problem inherited from his father who is is a successful gynaecologist in India), and an engineer, Howard, who to my viewing is just an obnoxious creep with no obvious redeeming qualities. (But then I've not seen the full run.) When Howard becomes a NASA astronaut, he is bullied by the other astronauts, and whilst bullying is never acceptable, it is difficult to be too judgemental in his case.

This group are scientists, and they are 'nerds'. They watch science fiction and superhero movies, buy comic books and action figures, play competitive board games and acquire all the latests technical gadgets. And, apart from Sheldon (who has a strong belief in following a principled rigorous regime of personal hygiene that makes close contact with other humans seem repulsive) they try, and largely fail, to attract women.

In case this does not seem sufficiently stereotypical, the situation is complete when a young woman moves into in the flat opposite Leonard and Sheldon: Penny is the 'hot' new neighbour, who comes across as a 'dumb blonde' (she wants to be an actress – she is actually a waitress whilst she works at that), something of a hedonist, and not having the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, science. Penny's plan in life is to become a movie star, and her back-up plan is to become a television star.

If Sheldon and his friends tend to rather fetishise science and see it as inherently superior to other ways of engaging in the world, then Penny seems to reflect the other side of 'the two cultures' of C. P. Snow's famous lecture/essay that described an arts-science divide in mid-twentieth century British public life. That is, not only an acknowledged ignorance of scientific matters, but an ignorance that is almost worn as a badge of honour. Penny, of course, actually has a good deal of knowledge about many areas of culture that our 'heroes' are ignorant of.

Initially, Penny is the only lead female character in the show. This creates considerable ambiguity in how we are expected to see the show's representations of scientists during the early series. Is the viewer meant to be sharing their world where women are objects of recreation and sport and a distraction from the important business of the scientific quest? Or, is the audience being asked to laugh at these supposedly highly intelligent men who actually have such limited horizons?

Sheldon: I am a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains.

Penny. Who's Radiohead?

[pause]

Sheldon: I have a working knowledge of important things in the universe.


Penny has no interest in science

So, the premise is: can the nerdy, asthmatic, short-sighted, physicist win over the pretty, fun-loving, girl-next-door who is clearly seen to be 'out of his league'.

Spoiler alert

Do not read on if you wish to watch the show and find out for yourself.  😉

A marriage made in the heavens?

I recently saw an episode in series n (where n is a large positive integer) where Leonard and Penny decided to go to Las Vagas and get married. Leonard said he had written his own marriage vows – and it was these that struck me as problematic. My complaint was nothing to do with love and commitment, but just about physics.


Cal Tech physicist Leonard Hofstadter (played by Johnny Galecki) wrote his own vows for marriage to Penny (Kaley Cuoco) in 'The Big Bang Theory'

A non-physical love?

I made a note of Leonard's line:

"Penny, we are made of particles that have existed since the moment the universe began. I like to think those atoms travelled 14 billion years through time and space to create us so that we could be together and make each other whole."

Leonard declares his love

Sweet. But wrong.

Perhaps Leonard had been confused by the series theme music, the 'History of Everything', by the band Barenaked Ladies. The song begins well enough:

"Our whole universe was in a hot dense state

Then nearly fourteen billion years ago, expansion started…"

Lyrics to History of Everything (The Big Bang Theory Theme)

but in the second verse we are told

"As every galaxy was formed in less time than it takes to sing this song.

A fraction of a second and the elements were made."

Lyrics to History of Everything (The Big Bang Theory Theme)

which seems to reflect a couple of serious alternative conceptions.

So, the theme song seems to suggest that once the big bang had occurred, "nearly fourteen billion years ago", the elements were formed in a matter of seconds, and the galaxies in a matter of minutes. Leonard goes further, and suggests the atoms that he and Penny are comprised of have existed since "the moment the universe began". This is all contrary to the best understanding of physicists.

Surely Leonard, who defended his PhD thesis on particle physics, would know more about the canonical theories about the formation of those particles? (If not, he could ask Raj who once applied for a position in stellar evolution.)

The "hot dense state" was so hot that no particles could have condensed out. Certainly, some particles began to appear very soon after the big bang, but for much of the early 'history of everything' the only atoms that could exist were of the elements hydrogen, helium and lithium – as only the nuclei of these atoms were formed in the early universe.

The formation of heavier elements – carbon, oxygen, silicon and all the rest – occurred in stars – stars that did not exist until considerable cooling from the hot dense state had occurred. (See for example, 'A hundred percent conclusive science. Estimation and certainty in Maisie's galaxy'.) Most of the matter comprising Leonard, Penny, and the rest of us, does not reflect the few elements formed in the immediate aftermath of the big bang, but heavier elements that were formed billions of years later in stars that went supernovae and ejected material into space. 1 As has often been noted, we are formed from stardust.

"…So don't forget the human trial,
The cry of love, the spark of life, dance thru the fire

Stardust we are
Close to divine
Stardust we are
See how we shine"

From the lyrics to 'Stardust we are' (The Flower Kings – written by Roine Stolt and Tomas Bodin)

Does it matter – it is only pretend

Of course The Big Bang Theory (unlike the big bang theory) is not conjecture, but fiction. So, does it matter if it gets the science wrong? The Big Bang Theory is not meant to be science fiction, but a fiction that uses science to anchor it into a situation that will allow viewers to suspend disbelief.

Leonard is a believable character, but Sheldon is an extreme outlier. Howard and Raj are caricatures, exaggerations, as indeed are Amy (neurobiologist) and Bernadette (microbiologist) the other core characters introduced later.

But the series creators and writers seem to have made a real effort at most points in the show to make the science background authentic. Dialogue, whiteboard contents, projects, laboratory settings and the like seem to have been constructed with great care so that the scientifically literate viewer is comfortable with the context of the show. This authentic professional context offers the credible framework within which the sometimes incredible events of the characters' lives and relationships do not seem immediately ridiculous.

In that context, Leonard getting something so wrong seems incongruent.

Then again, he is in love, so perhaps his vows are meant to tell the scientifically literate viewer that there is a greater truth than even science – that in matters of the heart, poetic truth trumps even physics?

A Marillion song tells us:

A wise man once wrote
That love is only
An ancient instinct
For reproduction
Natural selection
A wise man once said
That everything could be explained
And it's all in the brain

Lyrics from 'This is the 21st Century' (Hogarth)

But as the same song asks: "where is the wisdom in that?"


Source cited:
  • Snow, C. P. (1959/1998). The Rede Lecture, 1959: The two cultures. In The Two Cultures (pp. 1-51). Cambridge University Press.

Note:

1 I was tempted to write 'most of the atoms'. Certainly most of the mass of a person is made up of atoms 2 that were formed a long time after the big bang. However, in terms of numbers of atoms, there are more of the (lightest) hydrogen atoms than of any other element: we are about 70% water, and water comprises molecules of H2O. So, that is getting close to half the atoms in us before we consider all the hydrogen in the fats and proteins and so forth.


2 That, of course, assumes the particles we are made of are atoms. Actually, we are comprised chemically of molecules and ions and relatively very, very few free atoms (those that are there are accidentally there in the sense they are not functional). No discrete atoms exist within molecules. So, to talk of the hydrogen atoms in us is to abstract the atoms from molecules and ions.

Leonard confuses matters (and matter) by referring initially to particles (which could be nucleons, quarks?) but then equating these to atoms – even though atoms are unlikely to float around for nearly 14 billion years without interacting with radiation and other matter to get ionised, form molecules, that may then dissociate, etc.

For many people reading this, I am making a pedantic point. When we talk of the atoms in a person's body, we do not actually mean atoms per se, but component parts of molecules of compounds of the element indicated by the atom referred to*. A water molecule does not contain two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, but it does contain two hydrogen atomic nuclei, and the core of an oxygen atom (its nucleus, and inner electron 'shell') within an 'envelope' of electrons.

* So, it is easier to use the shorthand: 'two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen'.

The reason it is sometimes important to be pedantic is that learners often think of a molecule as just a number of atoms stuck together and not as a new unitary entity composed of the same set of collective components but in a new configuration that gives it different properties. (For example, learners sometimes think the electrons in a covalent bond are still 'owned' by different atoms.) There is an associated common alternative conception here: the assumption of initial atomicity, where students tend to think of chemical processes as being interactions between atoms, even though reacting substances are very, very rarely atomic in nature.

Read about the assumption of initial atomicity