The science hidden in the Simpsons | Claudio Sanchez | TEDxRosario

In this funny talk Claudio Sanchez invites us to watch television with new eyes, and to let curiosity lead to the important scientific lessons hidden in everyday entertainment, like episodes of The Simpsons.

Claudio Sanchez is an industrial engineer with a degree from the University of Buenos Aires. For over thirty years, he has been dedicated to education and promoting science. His work have been featured by various media channels in Argentina and abroad, and he participates as a guest on radio and television shows in Argentina, Uruguay and Spain. His specialty is the relationship between science and other areas of culture such as film, advertising, art and literature.

Surfing the internet,
I once stumbled upon a program

whose name I would translate

as a search engine for numbers
that Fermat missed,

but that he nearly got.

Close, but no cigar.

It's a very simple program
that tries different number combinations,

attempting to construct equations
like the one we have before us,

X to the n, plus Y to the n,
equals Z to the n.

For example:

3 squared is 9, 4 squared is 16,

5 squared is 25 and 9 plus 16 is also 25.

This program that I'm talking about

seeks to build more equations in this way
but with an additional restriction:

the n exponent must be greater than 2.

I mean, instead of working
with squared numbers,

it seeks to work with cubed numbers

to the power of four,
to the power of five,

to any power greater than 2.

And we know that under those conditions,

it is impossible to build
equations with that format.

We know this because it's called
Fermat's Last Theorem.

A theorem that is pretty famous,

because it was proposed in 1670,
and only proved in 1995.

It took over 300 years for mathematicians

to succeed in demonstrating
something that this guy Fermat

had said back in the seventeenth century.

Now, I said that the program
seeks to build equations

under specific conditions,

and then I added: it's impossible to build
equations with these characteristics.

So, what is happening here?

The program seeks to build equations
in this format and the restrictions,

but it also allows errors,
as small as possible.

This is one of the equations
generated by this program.

It has the desired format.

In this case, it works
with the power of 12.

It satisfies the condition
of being greater than 2,

but it's incorrect;
that equality isn't really achieved.

You can see here
the 2 terms created on the left.

The value of the sum

and the true value
of the term on the right.

There's an error from approximately
the tenth significant number.

That's so small, so tiny,

that if I verified that formula
using a common calculator,

it would accept it as correct,

because the error is too small
for a calculator to detect.

And I would find an equation
that the theorem says shouldn't exist.

To the creator of this program,
that honestly is of no interest;

it's a joke that makes us believe it found
something that mathematics prohibits.

The program was created by David Cohen.

He is a graduate in physics
from Harvard University.

He also has a PhD in Computer Science
from Berkeley.

But the most interesting thing
about this guy

is that he is one
of the creators of Futurama,

along with Matt Groening,

and penned the scripts
for many episodes of The Simpsons.

So, that formula that you saw a while ago

should not be so unfamiliar to you,

as it appears in a Simpsons' episode,

The Treehouse of Horror VI, 1995,
when Homer goes into the third dimension.

We see it there over Homer's head.

The is fact that Fermat’s theorem
has held out for more than 300 years.

The efforts to prove it
made it reach the newspapers

when it was finally proved,

which doesn't happen often,

something about mathematics
being published in the mainstream media.

And when this Simpsons' episode aired,

even more so when it was being written,

in the world of mathematics
and not only among mathematicians,

people were talking about this,

about whether Fermat's theorem
was finally proven,

after more than 300 years,

or if it was a false alarm,
like the times it was claimed in the past.

And this joke that The Simpsons made

by inserting this apparently
harmless equation into an episode,

was the way in which they made a reference

to the most famous mathematics news story
of the twentieth century.

The Simpsons came back to the same subject
a few years later,

by showing another equation
from the same family,

and generated by the same program.

Homer wrote it on a blackboard

in the episode where he finds out
who Edison was and tries to emulate him,

and invents things like
an electrical hammer,

a shotgun that applies makeup

or an alarm that goes off
when there is no problem:

the "everything's all right" alarm.

(Laughter)

You may think that
only someone like David Cohen,

a man that doesn't have one,
but two university degrees in sciences,

only someone like him could come up

with a joke about a theorem
and a mathematical formula.

But he's not a special case.

Take a look at all of these others here:

a degree in mathematics,

a PhD in inorganic chemistry,

a degree in physics
and history of science,

a PhD in computer science,

a university professor,

a PhD in applied mathematics,

an electrical engineer,

a mathematics graduate,

a neuroscience graduate.

These are are some
of the screenwriters for The Simpsons

or people involved in making the show.

And that's why there are all these
mathematical and scientific jokes.

The Simpsons is full of them,
episode after episode.

Let's look at some examples.

Good news, Simpsons!

We found your daughter's belongings.

Where did you find these?

Giant tongue.

Oh, I knew it!

We also discovered something very unusual
at that museum.

Oh my God! What?

Well, if you drop a feather
and a bowling ball in a vacuum,

they'll fall at the same rate.

You think you've seen it all in this job,

and then something like that comes along.

(Applause)

The fact that a feather
and a bowling ball,

a rock or any other heavy object,

fall at the same rate is not obvious.

If I did the test here,

you'd see the feather would fall
much more slowly.

Galileo was the first
to accurately explain

that the feather falls more slowly
because the air slows it down,

and that if the same experiment
were done in a vacuum,

they'd fall at the same speed.

Galileo reached that conclusion
purely through reasoning,

not by actually doing the test
to see what would happen.

He couldn't do the test in his era,

because there was no way
to make a vacuum in a room or container

in order to perform the experiment.

The vacuum pump

was only invented a few years
after Galileo's death.

Today, the test is done routinely
at science museums,

or it can also be done
without making a vacuum,

by going to a place where
there's a natural vacuum.

(David Scott, video) In my left hand,
I have a feather.

In my right hand, a hammer.

(C. Sanchez) This was filmed on the Moon
in 1971, during the Apollo 15 mission.

The astronaut has a feather
in his left hand,

a hammer in his right hand,

and he says he's going to test
Galileo Galilei's claim

that things should fall
at the same speed in a vacuum,

and what better place
for that than the Moon.

(Video) We thought we'd try it
here for you.

The feather is, appropriately,
a falcon feather for our Falcon.

(C. Sanchez) He has the feather,

he raises both,
he's going to release them.

(Video) Hopefully, they'll hit the ground
at the same time.

(C. Sanchez) Look closely.

(Video) How about that!

This proves Mr. Galileo
was correct in his findings.

(C. Sanchez) "Mr. Galileo was correct."

If you search for
"Galileo was correct" on YouTube,

you will find the original video.

That is from the episode

when the bus that takes the kids
to school falls into water

and the boys end up on a desert island
and they fight over food,

they're chased by a wild boar
and they put war paint on their faces.

And the whole story is inspired

by the novel The Lord of the Flies,
by Nobel Prize winner William Golding

that also talks about some kids

whose plane falls into the sea
and they end up on a desert island.

And they fight for food,
there's a wild boar that scares them,

they put on war paint.

And the novel has
a very interesting detail,

where the author made a mistake.

I am talking about the novel,
not the episode inspired by it.

In the novel, the boys have to build
a fire at a certain point,

to cook their food

and to use as a signal fire
for a ship to come and rescue them.

They don't have matches,
they don't have a lighter.

They try rubbing twigs together,
without success.

Then one of the boys
takes another boy's glasses

and lights a fire by focusing
the sun's rays with the lenses.

The problem is that the main character,

the owner of the glasses,
is short-sighted,

and short-sighted glasses
aren't suitable for making a fire.

We can do it with a magnifying glass,

because it can focus the rays,
the sun's energy, in one point.

That's why magnifying glasses
are called converging lenses.

Shortsighted people's glasses, like mine,

have diverging lenses.

They spread the sun's rays.

It's absolutely useless
trying to make a fire

with glasses like these.

If the novel's author knew this,

he would have made
the character longsighted

instead of shortsighted,
which is the opposite.

Longsighted glasses do work
as magnifying glasses,

and they could be used to start a fire.

The fire incident with the glasses
is recreated in this episode,

but it's resolved
in a much more ingenious way

and without so many optical complications.

They simply hit the glasses against a rock
to make fire with the sparks,

because this episode's writers

did know that longsighted glasses
are not useful for making fires.

We could go on,
there are dozens of these examples,

literally, dozens of jokes like these
in episodes of The Simpsons.

And you could ask, then,

do you have to be an engineer

or a physics graduate
to watch The Simpsons?

No, of course not.

But now that we know this,
we can re-watch all the episodes,

paying attention
to those jokes hidden in the background,

to discover and understand them.

Making an effort to understand those jokes

is an excellent and stimulating
intellectual exercise.

In fact, there are many things
that I now know

because they sparked my interest
when I saw them in a Simpsons' episode.

I hope that from this moment on

you can also enjoy
this intellectual stimulus.

Thank you.

(Applause)