The Jerusalem Duality

"The Jerusalem Duality" is the twelfth episode of the first season of the  sitcom The Big Bang Theory. This episode first aired on Monday, April 14, 2008.

Summary
Dennis Kim, a child genius, is looking around the university and seems to have outstripped Sheldon in every way. Sheldon decides to give up his own work and focus on other tasks. It annoys the guys so much that they try to distract Dennis in order to get Sheldon back to normal.

Extended Plot
The episode opens with Sheldon trying to explain the problems of to Leonard. They are approached by Eric Gablehauser, who introduces them, to Dennis Kim. Gablehauser then explains that Dennis is a and they want him to finish his doctorate at Caltech. Dennis is extremely obnoxious and mocks Sheldon's research. Sheldon is enraged. To keep Dennis happy, the two of them take him on a tour around the, but as soon as they approach Sheldon's Office, he retreats to the comfort of his office and abruptly ends his tour. Despite this disruption, Dennis enters his office and starts correcting his work. Soon, Dennis leaves, and Leonard continued to give him a tour. Sheldon is very because Dennis is only 15 years old, yet he is smarter than Sheldon.

Since Sheldon feels his work as a theoretical physicist is useless with the presence of Dennis, he decides to explore the work of his friends in hopes of a kind of collaboration, which is poorly received by everyone. Leonard, Howard, and Raj can't take anymore of Sheldon's attempt at "collaboration" so they gang together and come up with an idea of introducing Dennis to a hot girl to derail his focus. Sheldon is now focusing on creating a of  in  when Gablehauser comes in to announce that they are going to throw a welcoming party for Dennis. Sheldon plans to solve the crisis and win a  instead of one in physics.

At the welcoming party, the gang was successful in bringing a lot of hot young girls to the party. But they soon discover a problem; the child prodigy Dennis, like most extremely intelligent people, is socially awkward. As they try to think of a solution and battle repressed memories, they discover that Dennis has already scored with a girl named Emma. All the balance in Sheldon's "world" is restored once more. In the final scene, the gang spotted Dennis in the park with Emma, the gang sympathizes him as they have ruined his chances to achieve great things, but Sheldon says "Screw him. He was weak".

Critics

 * "I hope the producers can see the value of telling real stories and giving their characters developed personalities. Otherwise it is going to be a frustrating few years for viewers who crave something more. The show is good enough to survive and entertain but it could be even better. This is a typical effort, I hope one day it will be atypical." The TV Critic's Review
 * IMDb user reviews

Costume Notes

 * This episode features mostly t-shirts from Urban Outfitters...all of which are discontinued. If you want these, you're going to have to find them used. Sheldon starts the episode in a gray and purple striped tee with a yellow horizontal accent. When visiting Howard's engineering space at the university, Sheldon sports a gray tee with spectrum bars on it. He works on the New Jerusalem in Mexico problem wearing a black tee with dark gray stripes, and ends the episode with his Superman distressed logo shirt.
 * Leonard starts in his orange tee with large tree graphic, then moves into his half cat/half dog shirt, his red atomic structure shirt, and finally his green shirt with white recycle logo.

Trivia

 * First episode to feature a scene shot outside.
 * Eric Gablehauser: "And he’s (Dennis Kim) only fifteen years old." Sheldon: "Not bad, I myself started graduate school at fourteen."Dennis: "Well, I lost a year while my family was tunneling out of ." Leonard: "Advantage Kim." Leonard's response does not make sense, as Dennis Kim would have been 14 like Sheldon if he hadn't lost a year. Moreover, since Kim did lose a year, the advantage goes to Sheldon.
 * Dr. Gablehauser refers to Dennis Kim as a doctoral candidate to indicate that he is a potential Ph.D. student of the Caltech Physics Department. However, the term aforementioned applies only to admitted doctoral students who have completed all of the formal coursework and comprehensive examinations required of the degree, but have yet to complete the doctoral dissertation. Hence, Dennis is merely a prospective doctoral student, as opposed to a doctoral candidate.
 * When Dennis Kim enters Sheldon's office, his whiteboard features a massless two-loop self-energy diagram and the evaluation of the associated multiloop Feynman integral. Multiloop Feynman integrals appear when quantum-field amplitudes are constructed within perturbation theory. They are integrals over so-called loop momenta. Feynman integrals are usually complicated objects even in a one-loop approximation, so that the number of loops equal to two is already considered big. Feynman invented their graph-theoretic interpretation. (Refer to Graph Theory and Feynman Integrals by Noboru Nakanishi.)
 * First time the Caltech cafeteria is seen.
 * First time Sheldon's office is seen.
 * Sheldon states, "If you’re concerned about sharing credit with me, your name can go first." In "The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization", Sheldon was not so content with Leonard going first: "I let you think we went alphabetically to spare you the humiliation of dealing with the fact that it was my idea. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was throwing you a bone. You're welcome." In "The Cooper-Nowitzki Theorem", he absolutely refuses to share credit.
 * Second episode where Sheldon perceives guesses as unscientific. The first was "The Loobenfeld Decay".
 * Dennis Kim points out that Sheldon's string theory research is at a dead end. This foreshadows the events of "The Relationship Diremption", where Sheldon finds out his long-time string theory research is going nowhere.
 * This is the first episode where the guys make an inappropriate question by asking Penny if she can help them find a hot 15 year old girl into smart guys, not realizing what that sounds like.
 * Strangely, none of the guys seemed to consider what might happen if Dr. Gablehauser found out that they ruined his brightest recruit ever.

Quotes
Sheldon: 15 years old—Dennis Kim is 15 years old, and he's already correcting my work. Today I went from being  to—you know—that other guy.

Howard: .

Sheldon: Oh, God, now even you're smarter than me.

Sheldon: Engineering—where the semi-skilled laborers execute the vision of those who think and dream. Hello Oompa-Loompas of science.

Sheldon: Something remarkable. Since my prospects for the Nobel Prize in physics have disappeared, thank you very much, I’ve decided to refocus my efforts and use my people skills to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Look, I’m going to solve the Middle-East Crisis by building an exact replica of Jerusalem in the middle of the Mexican desert.

Gablehauser: To what end?

Sheldon: You know, it’s like the baseball movie, build it and they will come.

Penny (opening door): Oh, hey guys, what’s up?

Howard: We need a hot fifteen year-old Asian girl with a thing for smart guys.

Penny: What?

Leonard: Howard, that’s racist, any fifteen year-old girl will do the trick. (Penny slams door.)

Raj: It’s possible she may have misunderstood us.

Gablehauser: You'll have to excuse Dr. Cooper, he's been a under a lot of, um... He's nuts.