Sheldon’s WHITEBOARD from ep 1 Big Bang Theory explained (it was virtually my PhD thesis)
It’s fascinating Higgs boson-worthy particle physics stuff of course but at first I thought it was a little too pedestrian for Sheldon really. Then I noticed the intriguing non-tree level Feynman diagrams . .
Either way, this stuff was my bread and butter as a nuclear weak interactions theorist back in the 1990s. So, very pleasing to see it come up on Sheldon’s whiteboard in the very first ep.
And gotta love Lenard: “I have a whiteboard also”. LOL. (And BTW, no girls ever came to look at any of our whiteboards . . ).
Calculation #1
Here it is, shown as a simple Feynman diagram.
It looks like Sheldon was calculating a component of the lifetime of the most massive fermion, the ‘truth’ quark (via the decay t -> W + b).
We unromantically, usually referred to it as the t or top quark, as became preferred by stuffy sorts of people. They were probably right although I am highly attached to the names we (all continue to) use for the strange and charm quarks.
The lifetime of a particle is shorter the more ways it can decay into something else.
