- Penny Hofstadter: [knock knock knock] Sheldon?
- Penny Hofstadter: [knock knock knock] Sheldon?
- Penny Hofstadter: [knock knock knock] Sheldon?
- Sheldon Cooper: [opens door] It's annoying when you do it.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Thought you were getting us dinner.
- Penny Hofstadter: Sorry. I had to stop at Sheldon's and help him solve string theory.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: [dumbfounded] What?
- Penny Hofstadter: Yeah, turns out the answer's knots.
- Leonard Hofstadter: That's cute, but you can't have knots in more than four dimensions.
- Penny Hofstadter: [heading towards the bedroom] Mm... you can if you consider them sheets. Good night.
- Penny Hofstadter: Oh, Amy, you're here. Again.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Yeah, Sheldon said he needed another night to work, so I said I've give him some space.
- Penny Hofstadter: So what's all this?
- Leonard Hofstadter: Well, Amy and I were talking about old science fair projects and how fun it would be to re-create them.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: We're making hot ice.
- Leonard Hofstadter: It's pretty... cool.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: [high-fiving] Oh, nice one.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Turns out we both did this as our science fair projects in ninth grade.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Do you remember any of your high school projects?
- Penny Hofstadter: Uh... well, I remember telling Jenny Runyon that I would teach her how to flirt with boys if she put my name on her project. I got an "A", she got pregnant.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Girls like you are why I had to come straight home after school.
- Raj Koothrappali: Hey! Look what I got everybody.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Newspapers? Did you find a portal back to the 1990s?
- Penny Hofstadter: No. If he had that, he'd be trying to prevent *NSYNC from breaking up.
- Raj Koothrappali: Oh, please, I'm glad they broke up. Otherwise, Justin would never have brought sexy back.
- Sheldon Cooper: One thing you can't get on an iPad, the smell of ink and paper. One more reason iPads are better.
- Leonard Hofstadter: What are you doing?
- Penny Hofstadter: Making a boat. When I was a kid, my dad showed me how.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Boy, you'll do anything to avoid reading.
- Raj Koothrappali: Hey, uh, what do you think we should open our show with? Uh, "Thor and Dr. Jones" or "Let's Get Astrophysical"?
- Howard Wolowitz: I think we should start with something that gets them up on their feet. Maybe "Sherlock Around the Clock".
- Raj Koothrappali: Great, yeah. Uh, let's give it a try.
- [they start playing]
- Bernadette Rostenkowski: [over the baby monitor] Halley's napping! Keep it down!
- Howard Wolowitz: [into his own end] Right. Sorry.
- Raj Koothrappali: [turning his amp down] It's cool. We don't need volume to rock. Instead of blowing the roof off this place, we can gently lift it off and set it quietly down in the back yard.
- Raj Koothrappali: You guys do anything fun after dinner?
- Leonard Hofstadter: Uh, actually, Amy came back over and we hung out. Did you know that we were both spelling bee champs? We stayed up for hours trying to stump each other.
- Raj Koothrappali: Who won?
- Leonard Hofstadter: Uh, well, she thought she had me with "appoggiatura", but I shut that down expeditiously. E-X-P-E-D-I-T-I-O-U-S-L-Y, expeditously.
- Raj Koothrappali: Wow. I bet that made Penny take off all of her clothes. Put her pajamas on and then go to bed early.
- Leonard Hofstadter: At, like, 9:00, yeah.
- Sheldon Cooper: The answer is one in 18 million.
- Mary Cooper: What is?
- Sheldon Cooper: The odds of you running into Mr. Watkins.
- Mary Cooper: Oh, Shelly, I have bad news. Mr. Watkins passed this morning.
- Sheldon Cooper: Oh. Oh, I'm... I'm sorry.
- Mary Cooper: I know. What are the odds of that?
- Sheldon Cooper: [getting an idea] Call you back.
- Penny Hofstadter: I brought pizza.
- Sheldon Cooper: Oh, thank you. I have been working pretty hard. I... I could use a break.
- Penny Hofstadter: What's that?
- Sheldon Cooper: Oh, yeah, that is an experiment to see how many parallelograms I could draw while holding my breath.
- Penny Hofstadter: [seeing a parallelogram with a squiggly edge] Is that where you blacked out?
- Sheldon Cooper: [pointing to a spot behind the couch] No, actually, that's where I blacked out.
- Penny Hofstadter: And this?
- Sheldon Cooper: That is a list of all the different types of natural disasters.
- Penny Hofstadter: Firequake?
- Sheldon Cooper: I made that one up. Which I shouldn't have, because now I'm scared of it.
- Raj Koothrappali: They reviewed my planetarium show. Yeah. It's on page three of the Arts and Leisure section.
- Sheldon Cooper: [everybody opens their newspapers] Oh, look, they still have "Far Side". Oh, I don't get that one.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Oh, he's pushing when he should be pulling.
- Sheldon Cooper: Hmm. I don't think he belongs in that gifted school, then.
- Sheldon Cooper: Hello, mother.
- Mary Cooper: Hi there, Shelly. You will never believe who I ran into at the barbecue festival.
- Sheldon Cooper: I am right in the middle of some very important work. I don't have time for this right now.
- Mary Cooper: Then why did you answer the phone?
- Sheldon Cooper: Because you raised me to be polite. Now stop bothering me!
- Mary Cooper: Hello again.
- Sheldon Cooper: Who did you see at the barbecue festival?
- Mary Cooper: Mr. Watkins.
- Sheldon Cooper: Really? You called me and interrupted my work to tell me that you ran into somebody you could plausibly run into? I'm sorry, mother, I really need to focus here. I will speak to you next week.
- Mary Cooper: Okay, sweetheart. I'll talk to you then.
- [he hangs up; after a moment of looking at his white board, he dials his phone]
- Sheldon Cooper: I thought Mr. Watkins moved to Florida.
- Mary Cooper: He did. He was back visiting his son.
- Sheldon Cooper: Oh, gosh darn it, that is interesting. Was it Tommy or Joe? I bet it was Joe, 'cause he and Tommy had a falling out over that timeshare.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: This is fun. Playing with popsicle sticks, exploring ways to store kinetic energy. It's like preschool all over again.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Except now if I eat paste, it's because I want to, not because Craig Schultz is making me.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Hey, can I ask you a question?
- Leonard Hofstadter: Is it "Where was the teacher"? She was in the bathroom smoking, that's where.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: It wasn't, but I'm glad to see you've moved on. I was gonna ask if being married felt any different.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Oh. Uh... not really. Sorry. That probably wasn't the answer you were looking for.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: No, actually it is. I mean, Sheldon and I are in a really great place right now, and I just... I don't want anything to mess that up.
- Leonard Hofstadter: Mm-hmm. You do remember you're here because he kicked you out of your apartment?
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Okay, how do you want to play this? Do you want to pretend like nothing's bothering you and blow up later, or do you just want to be a maniac right now?
- Sheldon Cooper: Nothing is bothering me.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Fine. Be that way. If you want to talk, I'll be flushing my sinuses.
- Sheldon Cooper: I have a confession. When I berated Leonard, it was a clever ruse to conceal the fact that I'm not working on anything.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Well, I think I speak for everyone when I say
- [sarcastic]
- Amy Farrah Fowler: No!
- Sheldon Cooper: The truth is I have nothing of interest to pursue.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Well, maybe this is the perfect opportunity to take some time for yourself and re-focus. I'm sure you'll find something you're excited about.
- Sheldon Cooper: Thank you, Amy. I don't know what I'd do without you.
- Amy Farrah Fowler: [cut to her entering the other apartment] Hey, can I stay here? Sheldon kicked me out.
- Penny Hofstadter: Well, is everything okay?
- Amy Farrah Fowler: Yeah. He just wants some alone time to work.
- Penny Hofstadter: Hey, I thought you were working on actual science.
- Sheldon Cooper: I am. I'm trying to come up with a new approach to dark matter, but people keep distracting me. First, my mother kept answering the phone when I called, even though she knew I was busy. And now you show up with my favorite shape of food: a circle made of triangles served in a square box.
- Bert Kibbler: Hey, you want to hear one of my geology songs?
- Raj Koothrappali: So it's about rocks?
- Bert Kibbler: Better. It's about a boulder.
- Raj Koothrappali: Isn't that the same thing?
- Bert Kibbler: Far from it. A boulder has a diameter greater than 25.6 centimeters.
- Raj Koothrappali: Is that fact in the song?
- Bert Kibbler: No... Yes. It's sung from the viewpoint of the boulder that chases Indiana Jones.
- Raj Koothrappali: That's right up our alley. Let's hear it.
- Bert Kibbler: Alone in my temple in the middle of Peru/ A giant stone ball with nothing much to do/ But if you steal my idol, I will roll right over you.
- Sheldon Cooper: And then I was thinking about inventing a new dark matter particle to evade the omega baryon contraints, but that just seems like something anyone could come up with.
- Penny Hofstadter: [not listening] Mm. Agreed. You know what's blowing my mind? Somebody thought about putting cheese in this crust.
- Sheldon Cooper: I just wish I could find something that excites me.
- Penny Hofstadter: You... you do understand that crust doesn't normally come with cheese in it?
- Penny Hofstadter: What got you excited about dark matter in the first place?
- Sheldon Cooper: Well, I left string theory, which I'd been working on for a long time, and everyone was talking about how cool dark matter was, and I thought "Well, sure, I'll give that a whirl."
- Penny Hofstadter: So it's your rebound science?
- Sheldon Cooper: What's that?
- Penny Hofstadter: Well, not the science you spend the rest of your life with, but the one you use to make yourself feel pretty again.
- Sheldon Cooper: If I'm being honest, I never forgot about string theory. I mean, it's remarkable. It's the closest we've come to a theory of everything, something even Einstein couldn't figure out.
- Penny Hofstadter: Well, if he couldn't figure it out, maybe it's just wrong.
- Sheldon Cooper: But it's so elegant. I mean, look.
- [getting up and drawing on his white board]
- Sheldon Cooper: String theory posits that the fundamental particles we see in three dimensions are actually strings embedded in multidimensional space-time.
- Penny Hofstadter: Interesting. So that would mean... that...
- [pause]
- Penny Hofstadter: Can't do this by myself, buddy.
- Howard Wolowitz: [after annoying Bernadette] Good news! I'm back in the band!
- Raj Koothrappali: So, Bernadette doesn't mind?
- Howard Wolowitz: It was her idea!
- Penny Hofstadter: So it's sort of like a guitar string, but instead of making an actual sound, each vibration is a different particle.
- Sheldon Cooper: Precisely. And when you express it in eleven dimensions, Einstein's relativity equations pop out. Does that sound like a coincidence?
- Penny Hofstadter: It does not.
- Sheldon Cooper: Yup. That's what I think.
- Penny Hofstadter: So... so, did we do it? Did we just solve string theory?
- Sheldon Cooper: [with a chortle] Oh. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but this is not the sort of thing we can figure out in a night. People have been stuck on this for decades.
- Penny Hofstadter: What, decades? Really? It's... it's a string. How hard can it be? It-it... it's straight, it's in a loop, it gets knotted up with other strings. Uh...
- Sheldon Cooper: Well, actually, there are no knots in anything greater than four dimensions. Ooh, unless we get around that by considering them as sheets. You know, topologically speaking, that has a lot of interesting possibilities.
- Penny Hofstadter: See? How long did that take me, like a minute?