Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

Welcome to StarTalk Radio, I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director

of New York City's Hayden Planetarium.

This week we're going to talk about the hit CBS television series The Big Bang Theory.

For those who may have never seen it, it follows the adventures of four scientists, Leonard,

Sheldon, Raj, and Howard, as well as the girl next door, Penny, who's an aspiring actress

and a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory.

We'll learn more about all these characters later in the program, but I should let you

know that if you do a Google search on Big Bang Theory, number one is this TV show,

and number two is The Origin of the Universe.

I sat down with Bill Prady, co-creator and writer of the show in his office in Los Angeles,

and joining us was David Salzburg, an astrophysicist at UCLA and science advisor to the show.

The first question I had to ask was, what were you thinking creating a show about geeky scientist?

And why did you think anyone would watch it?

As I understand the world, there are nothing but geeky people in it.

So based on me and the people I know.

So to me, it's a depiction of the world as I see it.

So you have geeky roots.

To lead to it, I have the geekiest of roots.

Before I was a television writer, I was a computer programmer.

And this is back in the early PC days, before they were called PCs, when they were called

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