The Higgs Boson Observation

"The Higgs Boson Observation" is the third episode of the sixth season of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. This episode first aired on Thursday, October 11, 2012.

Summary
Sheldon hires a graduate student as an assistant who first worries Amy until it appears that she is more interested in Leonard. Also Howard is having trouble with his crew mates on the International Space Station.

Extended Plot
Penny brings in a box for Sheldon from his mother and he tips her a dollar. Sheldon had his s and research he wrote as a child sent to him. Since the verification of the existence of the, the scientist that postulated its existence a half a century ago, , could be heading to a. Sheldon wants to check his earlier work to see if he already hit upon an idea to get his. He needs someone to read through these notebooks since he thinks his time is too important to do the task himself. First he asks Leonard, who declines. Penny volunteers, however she couldn't even understand the title of a paper Sheldon wrote at the age of five: "A Proof That Algebraic Topology Can Never Have a Non-Self-Contradictory Set of Abelian Groups". At Leonard's suggestion, he hires a, an attractive student named Alex Jensen. She does flatter him during the interview and thinks it's an honor to work for him. Sheldon makes sure that she doesn't do drugs including, has no hearing loss due an ear infection she experienced years ago, and that she has paid all her s. She is willing to do everything he asks her to do. Leonard felt that she seemed nice and tells her, "May God have mercy on your soul" for working with Sheldon. Raj is attracted to her, but since Raj wouldn't speak to Sheldon and Leonard in front of Alex, Alex wondered what the matter with Raj was.



Penny is giving Amy a which she wants to show Sheldon. Amy tells Penny that if it leads to, Penny will have to leave the room. When Alex answers Amy's to Sheldon, Amy is shocked when she learns that Alex is a girl. Alex tells Amy that Sheldon left a message not to be disturbed unless it's Stephen Hawking, his mother or himself from the future. Alex did take a message. Amy is upset and confides to Penny that while Sheldon told her that he had a new assistant named Alex, he did not tell Amy that Alex was a girl, to which Penny wondered if he even noticed. Amy replies that she is more worried about Alex than she is about Sheldon, especially  when a woman hangs around that wonderful face of his (Sheldon's) for eight hours a day, how could she not fall in with it. Amy gets Penny to go to Caltech to meet Sheldon's new assistant. Amy bursts into Sheldon's office, but doesn't find him there though does leave her scent. Amy leaves her scent to keep Sheldon interested and admits that she's done the same thing in Penny's apartment before they became best friends.



In the cafeteria, Alex brings Sheldon his to his usual exact specifications with the exception of leaving one cherry stem on the bottom, leaving Sheldon "disappointed." Leonard invites her to join them, but Sheldon doesn't want her to after seeing how servants are treated on a British series (referring to the show ). Leonard urges her to sit down anyway and impishly suggests that she talk to Raj about her about s. Predictably, Raj silently gets up and moves over to the next table, prompting a smug look from Leonard and a silent head shake from Sheldon.

Leonard continues speaking gregariously to Alex and she starts getting , laughing at Leonard's jokes and complimenting him on his sense of humor. Amy and Penny secretly observe her actions from the doorway, and it becomes clear to Amy that she doesn't have to worry about Sheldon since his assistant appears interested in Leonard. She relays this fact to Penny, who continues to watch Alex with narrow eyes.

During their car ride on the way home, Amy tells Penny that Alex was definitely courting Leonard. Penny downplays these actions by insisting that everything is fine and that she remains uncertain of where her relationship with Leonard is right now. Amy explains that although the  of Penny's brain is telling her there's nothing to worry about, the limbic system is telling her that Alex's attraction to Leonard must mean that he's desirable. While Penny admits that Leonard is definitely desirable, she waffles back and forth on whether it bothered her to see another woman flirting with him, eventually admitting to herself: "OK it bothers me!"



That night while having beer and, Penny keeps asking Leonard about his day, but he never mentions Sheldon's new female assistant. Sheldon then shows up with Alex, announcing that she may have found something in his grade school science project report that could be his ticket to a Nobel Prize.

Penny introduces herself to Alex, who mistakes her for Leonard's assistant. Penny replies that they were working on a five-year experiment, which confuses both Leonard and Sheldon. Alex replies that she is sure that a lot of people would want to work with someone as talented as Leonard. Penny quips that a lot of people can't, and then she takes Leonard to her apartment because her limbic system wants to take his pants off (i.e. have sex). As Penny is leaving with Leonard, Alex remarks that she seems nice, showing she has no ulterior motives outside of working with Sheldon. Meanwhile, Howard tells Bernadette that being cooped up in "this old tin can" for weeks on end is getting to him. He asks her to drop something so he can watch it fall. In another video chat, Howard tells her that due to the delay of the that is supposed to pick up the s, he will have to stay in space for an additional 7-10 days. He is suffering bad s, starts sounding, and gives her crazy ideas on how she can rescue him. He also starts talking to her in code. Eventually, he is captured by the other astronauts, held down and given a. It makes him feel better though he begins acting strangely afterwards, such as taking off his pants and wind milling in the capsule. Bernadette then tells him to put his pants back on.

Critics

 * The TV Critic: "As I always maintain, the show is at its best when new characters interact with the established eccentricities of the cast. Sure enough Alex's arrival prompts several fun moments...The writers are certainly committed to Howard's space travel and I guess you won’t see anything like it on another sit com. His misery at being kept up there for a long period of time makes perfect sense and I did laugh at his fearful statement that the  “left dogs up here in the 60s!”...This was pretty good. Not funny throughout but by far the best of the season so far."
 * The A.V. Club gave this episode an A-.
 * IMDb user reviews

Costume Notes

 * Sheldon wears a blue Superman Vitruvian man t-shirt by Fat-Tee, the AV Club green t-shirt by Heavy Rotation, and a red Flash- Crimson Comet shirt.

Trivia

 * Sheldon's source of inspiration for this episode stems from the announcement that physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider had discovered a particle matching the description of the and possibly confirmed the theory of Higgs, et. al. on how subatomic particles acquire mass – a central part of the . (Refer to Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe.) Previously, in "The Wiggly Finger Catalyst" (S5:E04), Sheldon came close to figuring out why the Large Hadron Collider had yet to isolate the Higgs boson. In this later episode, Sheldon explains: "Now, in 1964, Dr.  -- accomplished self-promoter and physicist -- he wrote a paper postulating the existence of a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. Now, initially, the paper was rejected.
 * But, recently, he was proven right, and now he’s on the fast track to win a Nobel Prize...The point is i Higgs is being celebrated for work he did 50 years ago. So, that got me thinking...Perhaps, I’ve already hit upon the idea that will win me my Nobel Prize." Indeed, the prize had been expected and Peter W. Higgs (jointly with ) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.” (See also Update: Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson and For Nobel, They Can Thank the ‘God Particle’.)
 * Sheldon hires an assistant, Alex Jensen, in this episode. Previously, in "The Cooper-Nowitzki Theorem", Ramona Nowitzki served as Sheldon's assistant, albeit voluntarily with ulterior motives though she still seemed to adore him. Two other episodes where a main character gets an assistant include "The Griffin Equivalency" and "The Vacation Solution".
 * Like Dennis Kim, Alex Jensen has a degree in physics from.
 * Alex Jensen's father is a.
 * Raj's expertise in the field of is extended to include looking for  at the Earth-Sun . In October 2010 the first   was discovered. It currently oscillates around Earth's L4 Lagrange point, although it may have been oscillating about L5 prior to 500 A.D. - perhaps The Big Bang Theory was just 1500 years late. (NASA press release, National Geographic article)
 * Alex Jensen informed Amy of Sheldon's request, "He’s asked me to hold all calls unless you’re Stephen Hawking, his mother, or himself from the future." Stephen Hawking was also mentioned in the pilot, "The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis", and "The Agreement Dissection", and seen in "The Hawking Excitation" and is heard in subsequent seasons.
 * The office Sheldon acquired following Professor Rothman's retirement in "The Rothman Disintegration" is featured in this episode. Herein, the issue of the The Journal of Physical Chemistry A with a picture of Sheldon on the cover, first appearing in "The Beta Test Initiation", can be observed framed on a wall. Sheldon also has an Albert Einstein Bobblehead on his desk.S06E03EinsteinBobble.jpg
 * Sheldon gives Penny for her labor to bring him the box of journals, quite like what he did in "The Gothowitz Deviation" except with.
 * First appearance of Penny at Caltech since "The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis".
 * Bernadette's working place is shown for the first time. Also, a blue sign with word ZANGEN in an ellipse can be seen on her uniform, presumably the name of the company where she works.
 * Syndication in this episode does not show a laboratory at Zangen that Bernadette works for. There are no episodes in the entire Big Bang Theory show where Bernadette is seen doing experiements in one or two of the labs of Zangen either (as of only one or two labs being shown at Caltech where the men and sometimes Amy work at in some of the entire episodes of The Big Bang Theory so far).
 * Bernadette is only seen in the 'Office at Zangen' scenes of this episode where she is seen chatting to Howard in space on Skype and she shares no scenes with the five other gang members in this episode.
 * Second episode where a TBBT character under the influence delivers a moon joke and removes their pants in front of a camera. The first was Sheldon in "The Pants Alternative".
 * Alex tries to make a connection with Leonard who completely misses it.
 * The title of Sheldon's preschool paper (A Proof That Algebraic Topology Can Never Have a Non-Self-Contradictory Set of Abelian Groups) makes no sense as stated. As is explained here, algebraic topology is a field of study (in particular, the application of algebraic methods to the field of topology), not a type of topology. Therefore, it cannot "have a set" of anything. By comparison, the statement would be meaningful (though not necessarily truemathematician please verify) if it said "trivial" instead of "algebraic", as the trivial topology is a type of topology.
 * Skipping over the nonsensical title and assuming instead a similar proof for a valid, even if simple, topology type, the subject of the paper is fairly advanced; such a proof would require a working knowledge of graduate-level mathematical theory.
 * Penny asks Sheldon whether she's "just a blonde monkey" to him upon seeing Sheldon's childhood paper. While Sheldon remarks that "[she] said it, not [him]", incidentally, Penny does become a blonde monkey in Season 7 when she stars in Serial Ape-ist 2: Monkey See, Monkey Kill. On the other hand, she gets fired before most of the scenes of her wearing the gorilla mask with a blonde mop of hair are made.

Quotes

 * Sheldon: Do you know about the Higgs boson?
 * Penny: Of course. It's, it's been in the news, and it's a very famous boson.


 * Sheldon: Flattery will get you nowhere.
 * Alex: It's not flattery if it's true.


 * Amy: You're right, I don't have to worry, that skank is your problem, not mine.


 * Amy: (to Penny) If my new look leads to phone sex, I'm going to have to ask you to leave the room.


 * Penny: I'm just a blonde monkey to you, aren't I?
 * Sheldon: You said it, not me.


 * Leonard: So, Alex, what’s the topic of your dissertation?
 * Alex: I’m looking for Trojan asteroids at Earth’s L-Five Lagrange point.
 * Leonard: Oh, that happens to be Dr. Koothrappali’s field of expertise. You two have a lot to talk about.
 * Alex: Is that true? Is he all right?
 * Leonard: No. But compared to your boss, he’s the poster boy for sanity.


 * Howard: (crazed whisper) They left dogs up here in the sixties...