Sheldon's Spot

Sheldon's Seat is a place in Sheldon and Leonard's apartment which Sheldon has, in his own words,"placed in a state of eternal dibs", and has little tolerance for anybody who tries to sit there. Sheldon defines his seat as "It is the singular location in space around which revolves my entire universe.." in The Apology Insufficiency. " In the Pilot, Sheldon differentiates that seat from the other seats by saying to Penny "In the winter, that seat is close enough to the radiator to remain warm and yet not so close as to

cause perspiration. In the summer, it's directly in the path of a cross breeze created by opening windows there and there. It faces the television at an angle that is neither direct, thus discouraging conversation, nor so far wide to create a parallax distortion..." The spot is so important to him because, according to The Cushion Saturation, "in an ever changing world, it is a single point of consistency. If my life were expressed as a function on a four-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, that spot, at the moment I first sat on it, would be (0,0,0,0)."

Origin
In The Staircase Implementation (when Leonard talks to Penny about when he first met Sheldon), it is learned that Sheldon had a spot where he always sits far before the acquisition of the couch. Of this spot (a lawn chair), Sheldon says "... I have placed it (the seat) in a state of eternal dibs". While his justification for the positioning of this seat is similar to that of his future self, Sheldon was less socially inclined, thus the seat "... [facing] the television at a direct angle ... [to avoid] being subjected to conversation ...".



When Leonard questions him, he says: "cathedra mea, regulae meae. That's Latin for 'my chair, my rules'". However, once Sheldon finds that Leonard bought a couch for $100 from some people moving out of the apartment, he sits in each spot on the couch until he finds the one he likes best. Though this would become Sheldon's famous seat, he says that he's still not comfortable when he sits in it for the first time: "I'm still not comfortable. (pause) Of course, there's too many people here." When Leonard, Raj, and Howard leave, Sheldon smiles and says "Oh yes. This is definitely going to be my spot", and thus, "Sheldon's Spot" was created.