Sheldon Lee[2] Cooper[3], B.S., M.S., M.A., Ph.D., Sc.D.[4], is a Caltech theoretical physicist who shares an apartment with his colleague and best friend, Leonard Hofstadter. Originally from East Texas, Sheldon started college at the age of 11, receiving his first Ph.D. at the age of 16. Sheldon was involved in numerous experiments as a wunderkind, such as his plan to provide free electricity for his hometown by building a nuclear reactor - a plan stopped by government pen pushers claiming it's illegal to store Yellowcake uranium in a garden shed! Proudly geeky, he has no qualms about speaking Klingon, wearing vintage t-shirts sporting superhero logos, or spouting various historical and cultural anecdotes (e.g., his account of the introduction of the fork into Thailand). While he might claim to be the perfect human specimen, Sheldon does have his faults. Sheldon is characterized by a strict adherence to routine and hygiene; an overly intellectual personality; a tenuous understanding of irony, sarcasm and humor; and a general lack of humility or empathy, the former of which is demonstrated in the fact that he has no problem voicing to his peers his admiration for his superior intellect. These qualities, along with his penchant for pranks, are his character's main source of humor. He has been described as the show's breakout character.
Early Life
Sheldon was born in a Walmart in Galveston, Texas to Mary Cooper, and was officiated at the Lawrence Memorial Hospital, although he actually "fell out" of her at a K-mart in 1980. His father, George Cooper, died quite a while ago due to weight problems. He has a twin sister named Missy and an older brother named George Jr., both described by their mother to be "dumb as soup." Sheldon was raised according to his mother's Evangelical Christian beliefs, e.g., learning how to pray and becoming the co-captain of the East Texan Christian Youth Holy Roller Bowling League Championship team, seven-to-twelve year-old division. Meanwhile, he was forced to watch football by his father.
Like a typical nerd, Sheldon was bullied a lot during his childhood, mostly because he constantly expressed intellectual superiority to his peers (as he does now.) The bullying consisted of, but was not limited to, being beaten up, getting swirlies (even in church), noogies and wedgies, and having his personal belongings stolen. Sheldon even tells Amy Farrah Fowler, that his childhood was "hell." Further anecdotes reveal he built a so-called "Sonic Death Ray" that didn't even slow down the neighbor kids (all it did was annoy their dog), and constructed an armed robot using integrated circuits from ceramic semiconductor substrates cooked in a modified Easy-Bake Oven, to defend his room from Missy (Missy's eyebrows were burned off as a result of a malfunction).
At the age of five, Sheldon wrote a paper entitled "A Proof That Algebraic Topology Can Never Have a Non-Self-Contradictory Set of Abelian Groups" and his grade school science project paper, with the original
A Caltech Diploma on Sheldon's office wall.
title "A Rederivation of Maxwellās Equations Regarding Electromagnetism", contains an approach that might change the way ferromagnetic hysteresis is calculated. Sheldon entered college at the age of eleven, right after completing the fifth grade. At age twelve, filled with disappointment at not receiving a titanium centrifuge to separate radioactive isotopes, he had to be flown to a hospital by helicopter to be treated for radiation damage following a mishap when he built a CAT scanner (which also resulted in the death of his sister's guinea pig, Snowball). He also, at this time, conducted experiments involving the height of stairs only to deduce that if a step on a staircase is two millimeters off or more, a person is likely to trip - his findings evidenced by his father breaking his clavicle. When Sheldon was thirteen, he attempted to build a nuclear reactor in order to provide free electricity for his town, but it failed after a government agent informed him that it was illegal to store Yellowcake uranium in a shed; he then had a big tantrum as a result. When Sheldon was fourteen years old, he graduated college summa cum laude, began graduate school, and was the youngest person at the time to receive the Stevenson Award at "fourteen and a half." He received his first doctorate at the age of sixteen and he then spent four years on his second dissertation, before obtaining his current position.
Career
Dr. Sheldon Cooper is a former senior theoretical particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology, focusing on string theory and its alter ego M-theory. He held this position for three-and-a-half years at the outset of the show and up until the eighth season. As he was being paid under a grant to specifically research string theory, he is then promoted to junior professor in order to change his field of study to dark matter, with the stipulation that he teach a graduate-level class on analytical mechanics. Previously, he was a visiting professor at the Heidelberg Institute in Germany at age fifteen and examined perturbative amplitudes in N=4 supersymmetric theories leading to a re-examination of the ultraviolet properties of multiloop N=8 supergravity using modern twistor theory at age sixteen. His doodle of a hyperelliptic Riemann surface was the basis of his postdoctoral fellowship. He believes string theory better unites quantum mechanics with general relativity than does loop quantum gravity. He neither gives credence to the notion that quantized spacetime will manifest itself as minute differences in the speed of light for different colors (as he expects matter consists of tiny strings) nor that only loop quantum gravity calculates the entropy of black holes. Nonetheless, he is solely responsible for the university's six-loop quantum gravity calculations.
Sheldon's work on string theory is concentrated in several different directions. Notably, Sheldon has refocused his research from bosonic string theory to heterotic string theory. He wrote a paper on the decays of highly excited massive string states and illustrated mirror symmetry in the footnote of a publication. He determined that three-dimensional string-nets provided a unified picture of fermions and gauge bosons and reconciled the black hole information paradox with his theory of string-network condensates following a breakthrough in showing how neutrinos emerge from a string-net condensate. He also designated time for solving the spacetime geometry in higher spin gravity and worked on time-dependent backgrounds in string theory, specifically quantum field theory in D-dimensional de Sitter space.
Moreover, Dr. Cooper's research spans particle cosmology and studies the interplay between particle physics and cosmology during the early history of the Universe. With Rajesh Koothrappali, he explored the string theory implications of gamma rays from dark matter annihilations and considered methods of optimizing a particle detector for 500 GeV particles to this end. At a San Francisco conference, he tried to initiate a collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning physicist George Smoot by presenting him his paper on astrophysical probes of M-theory effects in the early universe. The famous physicist Stephen Hawking reached out to him during a lecture stay at Caltech after Sheldon's brilliant mind was revealed in a reading of his fascinating, though wrong, paper positing that the Higgs boson is a black hole accelerating backwards through time. Sheldon also maintained a correspondence with cosmological physicist Elizabeth Plimpton for years about their mutual interest in gravitational wave signatures of inflatons in the early universe. When Caltech received a new open science grid computer, he attempted to schedule time to run simulations of structure formation in the early universe. He was thinking about how one could use the fact that a rapidly rotating mirror turns virtual photons into real ones as a method of observing dark energy. However, he no longer preoccupies his time with investigating why the predicted mass of the quantum vacuum has little effect on the expansion of the universe.
Sheldon has redirected his work to the nature of dark matter. In addition to studying the WIMP model of dark matter, a particle physics point of view, he also considered the scalar-field model of dark matter, a large-scale geometric point of view. This led him to attempt a full proof of the Penrose Conjecture.
Bridging theory and experiment, Sheldon is active in the field of particle physics phenomenology at high-energy colliders such as the LHC. Sheldon came close to figuring out why the Large Hadron Collider had yet to isolate the Higgs boson particle. Though, he was refused clearance for a very prestigious government research fellowship at a secret military supercollider, located beneath a fake agricultural station 12.5 miles southeast of Traverse City, Michigan.
In a similar capacity, Sheldon has made advances in theoretical plasma physics, studying turbulence and how it might be reduced to improve fusion reactor designs. Consequently, Sheldon worked with colleague Barry Kripke on the grant proposal for a new fusion reactor, as the university was only allowed to submit one proposal.
From nuclear theoretic calculations, he was thought to have discovered a method for synthesizing a new stable superheavy element. Despite the fact that a Chinese research team at the Hubei Institute for Nuclear Physics ran a test on a cyclotron with extremely promising results and reportedly found the element, his calculations were wrong — the table from the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics in which he looked up the reaction rates of elements such as mendelevium, was in units of square centimeters (cm2), which he misread as square meters (m2), meaning he was off by a factor of 10,000. Sheldon surmised there must be some resonance between the elements he did not consider. In fact, someone from the Chinese research team added simulated signals to the data files, as Leonard Hofstadter re-ran the tests in his lab and disproved Sheldon's theory.
Sheldon additionally engages in condensed matter physics research on occasion and has lectured on topological insulators, as well as given a seminar on thermodynamic fluctuations. With Leonard, he coauthored a paper entitled Paradoxical Moment-of-Inertia Changes Due to Putative Super-Solids, to be presented at an Institute for Experimental Physics topical conference on Bose-Einstein condensates. He discovered that electrons traveling through a graphene sheet on hexagonal pathways possess zero effective mass since they coincidentally exhibit the same dispersion pattern as fermions and must be considered as a wave. In addition, he had a minor epiphany regarding the polymer degradation phenomenon.
From a philosophical perspective, Sheldon has grappled with Gedankenexperiments (i.e., "thought experiments") to illustrate the quantum measurement problem. He produced four out of the five Gedankenexperiments he thought necessary for a cogent restatement of the quantum measurement problem, before the information was lost.
For his contributions to theoretical physics, he won a Caltech Chancellor's Award for Science. In "The Monopolar Expedition", Sheldon received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to lead an expedition to the Magnetic North Pole in the Arctic Circle for an experiment in search of slow-moving magnetic monopoles, with Leonard, Raj and Howard as his support team. In the experiment, he detected what he believed was significant monopolar magnetic charge, validating one of the chief predictions of superstring theory. Though Sheldon publicly announced he had confirmed string theory and would receive a Nobel Prize, he learned that the charge detected was actually static electricity from the others' electric can opener, forcing Sheldon to issue a retraction to his announcement and severely damaging his reputation at the university. Soon after, National Public Radio with Ira Flatow from Science Friday interviewed him by phone from his office, regarding the recent so-called discovery of magnetic monopoles in spin ices. Based on his supposed discovery of a new stable superheavy element — which was actually a blunder — Sheldon appeared on Science Friday twice wherein a possible Nobel Prize in Chemistry was mentioned, had an article written about him in Physics Today and the National Science Foundation (NSF) wanted to give him a substantial grant.
Based upon a theory from Leonard, Sheldon wrote a paper detailing a theory that space-time is like a super-fluid. The paper was well received by the scientific community that included Professor Stephen Hawking.
In "The Anxiety Optimization", Sheldon is trying to increase his working efficiency by keeping a high anxiety level while driving everybody crazy. The only good point is that he wants his friends to annoy him. Extremely tired, both Penny and Leonard put him to bed singingSoft Kitty.
Characterization
Dr. Sheldon Cooper.
Aside from his characteristic idiosyncrasies, obsessions, and extreme narcissism, Sheldon is logical. He possesses an eidetic memory and an IQ of 187, although he claims his IQ cannot be accurately measured by normal tests. Sheldon has an overly extensive general knowledge, such as shown by his comments regarding various details of anecdotal knowledge (for instance, about the introduction of the fork into Thailand).
Sheldon also has qualities associated with being a prodigy, such as an inflated ego, social ineptitude, and an inability to relate emotionally with other people. Despite his intelligence, he has a distinct lack of emotional maturity and is often baffled by even the most common social interactions. He not only fails to understand the simplest sarcastic jokes made by his friends, but also regards their sadness over problems with blatant confusion.
Recently, he has begun to understand the concept of sarcasm, attempting unsuccessfully to employ it himself towards Penny in the second season, and successfully employing it towards his other friends in the third season. He appears to have a complete disinterest in romantic relationships, and his eccentricities, direct remarks, and demanding nature put him at odds with his own friends and especially Penny. Sheldon's expression of his more advanced intelligence has gotten him fired from his job, and even Leonard is surprised to learn that Sheldon is conceited enough to believe that Isaac Newton is intellectually inferior to himself. Sheldon hates it when someone stops him when he is trying to explain something. If this happens: a tic starts on his face until he can complete what he wants to say. He cannot and will not drive, and thus someone must always drive him unless in an extreme circumstance (like when he drives Penny to the emergency room in "The Adhesive Duck Deficiency".)
He also shows symptoms of obsessive compulsive personality disorder and Asperger syndrome, e.g., when he finds Penny's apartment messy, he sneaks in during the night and cleans it up because he can't stand being in the same hallway with something so disastrous. He refuses to sit anywhere other than his designated spot on the couch and follow set routines, and the running gag of the show is that when he knocks on Penny's door, he has to say Penny's name every three knocks (he does this thrice every time). The series creators do not want to specifically identify Sheldon's specific psychological malady.
Sheldon occasionally uses slang (in a very unnatural fashion), and follows jokes with his catchphrase "Bazinga!" He is not entirely sure how to hug someone, and he avoids human contact whenever possible. Despite his ego-centrism, Sheldon appears to be somewhat aware of his social ineptitude, particularly his lack of understanding of sarcasm. He mentioned that he keeps a record of his daily conversations after Penny snapped at him and Leonard asked him why, to which he suggested that Leonard check his conversation records "to see if I messed up anywhere." Sheldon is also a difficult person to work with and generally displays apathy to the world around him. In "The Toast Derivation", Sheldon was revealed to have criticized Bill Gates for focusing on his charity work rather than Windows Vista, a remark that earned him a punch in the face.
Sheldon does show on rare occasion interest in relationships, which was most prominently seen with Amy Farrah Fowler; however, he does not express it directly, instead developing strange behavior patterns such as buying cats or refusing to open discussion to the matter.
Appearances
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Appearances |
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| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Tot | |
| Season 1 | 17 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Season 2 | 23 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Season 3 | 23 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Season 4 | 24 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Season 5 | 24 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Season 6 | 24 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Season 7 | 24 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Season 8 | 24 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Traits Received By Other Characters as Annoying
Because of his eccentric and arrogant behavior, Sheldon is not well-liked by many people. Due to his belief that he's intellectually superior, he's not ashamed to insult his own friends, like Leonard, whose work Sheldon deems derivative and who never appreciated his overbearing mother; Howard, who is merely an engineer and not a real scientist, and also does not possess a doctorate; and Penny, who Sheldon considers the polar opposite of an intellectual. Even in "The Cooper-Nowitzki Theorem", Sheldon makes a speech to a class of grad students, reminding them that they will never be as smart as he is.
Sheldon's obsession with routine constantly causes friction with him and his friends. In "The Dumpling Paradox", he has an issue with Penny sleeping on the couch, because he wants to watch Doctor Who and Penny is sleeping in his spot. Leonard offers some alternatives, but Sheldon "can't" accept them, because they're not part of his routine. In the same episode, he states that he, Leonard and Raj can't order Chinese food without Howard. "Basic math simply won't allow it", as Sheldon puts it. Sheldon's routine is even written for everyone to view except for 1:45 to 2:05 in the afternoons, where he spends some recreational time in a storage room in the Caltech basement. Even his recreational time is planned and he spends it doing the same thing -- playing keepie uppie with a hacky sack.
Also, due to his lack of emotion and his inability to understand sarcasm, Sheldon never seems to realize when he's in trouble. When other people get mad at him, he blames them (their inability to "properly" understand the situation or the fact that they can't control their emotions). In "The Einstein Approximation", Sheldon tries to get a menial job. The woman at the employment office doesn't understand his behavior, and when he tells her he works as a physicist at Caltech, she thinks he's crazy and calls security. Sheldon isn't fazed by this, because in his mind, he's done nothing wrong, and he casually waits for her to return so they can finish.
Childlike Qualities
Sheldon also possesses many child-like qualities. For example, even though he is unaware of it, Sheldon is extremely stubborn. Examples of this include naming the Caltech Physics Bowl team or deciding to go to San Francisco by train instead of flying (due to his fascination and love of trains), and his needing of his mother (or Penny) to care for him when he is sick, which involves singing "Soft Kitty", having his Homemade Soup made for him and rubbing Vicks VapoRub on his chest. He cannot stand to be interrupted, concede when he doesn't know something, or hear people bicker or argue, crinkling his lips with intense frustration when any of these events occur. Sheldon has not attempted to obtain a driver's license (although he does possess a learner's permit), and needs his friends to drive him everywhere; he refuses the bus. He attempts to learn to drive on a simulator. However, he fails instantly. Sheldon's defense is that he is "too evolved" to perform plebeian tasks; driving.
In Season 5's "The Pulled Groin Extrapolation", Amy asked Leonard to attend a wedding with her. Leonard asked why she did not ask Sheldon to go instead. Amy answered that Sheldon behaved like a child the last time so he is out. After Amy left, Sheldon said in a sing-song tone to Leonard; "Heh heh, you have to go to a wedding!" as he was unwrapping his newly-bought toy train set, further emphasizing his childlike qualities.
He has also shown some slightly childish fear. In the Season 2 Episode, "The Euclid Alternative", Sheldon mutters something that shows that he has a night-light ("Maybe I could keep my sheets if I turn out the night-light").
However, the majority of these problems can be traced back to his root personality fault of stubbornness, which many fans believe is because of Asperger's and/or OCD.
Interests
Like his friends, he is scientifically inclined, and is fond of comic books, costumes, video games, flags and science fiction, specifically "Battlestar Galatica", "Doctor Who", "Stargate" series, "Star Trek", "Star Wars", and "Firefly", although he strongly dislikes "Babylon 5" because he thinks it lacks scientific integrity and is derivative. He has claimed to be an honorary graduate of Starfleet Academy, and is an avid fan of science officer Spock. Other favorite characters of his are Batman, The Flash and Frodo Baggins.
He likes playing Halo every Wednesday and paintball on the weekend with his friends. He can also play the piano and theremin, and seems to be a very good Tuvan throat singer, but would be better if not for a part in the roommate agreement denying him practice.
Physical Appearance
Sheldon's t-shirts
Sheldon is 6' 1" (1.86 m) with brown hair and blue eyes. His wardrobe consists of vintage T-shirts (which he always wears over a long-sleeve) adorned with references to superheroes, quantum physics, Sci-Fi television shows, and robots. Sheldon often expresses his mood through his choice of attire; especially his t-shirts. He's got a collection SO large in fact, that it has it's own page on the Wiki under Sheldon's Wardrobe. He also owns a dark blue plaid suit which he wears for lecturing and other formal occasions.
He also appears to enjoy Reddit, as he has been seen with a Reddit alien shirt. He usually wears a long sleeve shirt underneath it along with plaid pants. Sheldon is tall and thin (setting him apart from his shorter colleagues), with Penny, and later Leonard, saying he looks like a giant praying mantis.
Drugs and Alcohol
With few exceptions, Sheldon refuses all drugs, including alcohol and caffeine, as a promise to his mother (though it's suggested in "The Codpiece Topology" that he drinks Red Bull, which contains caffeine). In addition, when Penny mixed alcohol into his drink making it "slutty", he began to play the piano and sing To Life from the musical "Fiddler on the Roof" in front of an audience. A small amount of coffee made him extremely hyperactive, but unproductive in another episode. Taking Valium also affected his behavior. Probably the most infamous time of him being drunk was when he had to give a speech in "The Pants Alternative" and he acted like a comedian due to the abundance of wine he drank to calm his nerves. The scene was uploaded on YouTube where it is revealed Sheldon also took off his pants and mooned the audience. Howard once drugged him with his mother's sleep medication to get him to stop talking, but was unsuccessful.
While it is argued that Sheldon drank beer in the "Pilot", it is actually an orange soda (clearly seen when Leonard holds up his bottle in the hallway).
He does enjoy a Mountain Dew in "The Vengeance Formulation", one of the more caffeinated sodas, even calling it "refreshing". He also likes "diet virgin Cuba Libres", which is essentially a Diet Coke with a slice of lime. It appears that he can drink caffeinated beverages to a certain point, but not to the extent of coffee which he considers a drug.
In "The Habitation Configuration" Penny serves him numerous glasses of Long Island Iced Tea which he enjoys -- however, he is unaware of the fact it is alcoholic (and not actually tea as he genuinely believes) and Penny makes no move to correct his assumption. This drastically affects his behavior to the point where he attempts to 'beat' an apology out of Wil Wheaton.
In "The Thanksgiving Decoupling" he drinks beer with Bernadette's father, As a result, he became drunk and did numerous things, like burping pi, or as much as he could without throwing up, making fun of Howard's mother and her "bathroom clowns" by saying you could only fit one of her in a car, and insulting Howard, calling him the "clown that came out of her. After apologizing for his behavior, he sent Amy to get him and Mike beers and slapped her on the butt, much to her pleasure. Later, he threw up on the clowns in the bathroom.
Softer Side
Despite his strange behavior, Sheldon had, at times, demonstrated a much softer side to himself. He does seem to be a quite heartwarming character; however, these moments are rather rare, and usually only reserved for those closest to him, such as his mother, Meemaw, Amy and his friends.
Although his friendship with Leonard is usually strained because of Sheldon's quirky behavior and weird habits, Sheldon has called Leonard "his little buddy" or something of the sort on multiple occasions. He also shows an obvious unease whenever his friendship with Leonard is threatened.
Sheldon has also showed friendly acts of caring towards Penny. In one instance, when Penny was low on money, Sheldon let her borrow a large amount of his savings, but while she worried about paying it back, he was entirely unconcerned as to when he got it back. Sheldon's willingness to lend money to others was later described by Leonard as "one of the few idiosyncrasies that doesn't make you want to, you know, kill him". Also, after Penny let him stay at her place when he locked himself out of his apartment, Sheldon sincerely thanked her for it.
When Penny fell and dislocated her shoulder, Sheldon spent the entire night taking care of her, including driving her to the hospital despite the fact that he does not know how to drive. He finished the night by helping her into bed and singing soft kitty to her after she asked him too. He also hugged Penny again when she said she would talk to Leonard about having him take Sheldon to Switzerland rather than her. This prompted him to sincerely thank her and hug her.
With the exception of his family, Penny, Wil Wheaton, Amy and Leonard are the only people Sheldon have hugged. With Amy, he specifically cuddled with her in the episode "The Isolation Permutation", after a discussion to console a weepy Amy who was craving human intimacy and physical contact. After turning down Amy's previous proposals of getting into bed together and French-kissing, Sheldon agreed with her final offer to cuddle, though he got upset over it later, by yelling at Leonard and Howard to keep Penny and Bernadette in line and have them apologize to Amy since consoling Amy had caused him to miss the time he had designated to solve Spacetime Geometry in Higher Spin Gravity and building his Lego Death Star. This particular event of him cuddling with Amy is a huge development of his personality since he is not shown to have much empathy or sympathy for others.
His caring attitude towards Amy is also exemplified when he buys her a diamond tiara as a form of apology after having a fight regarding the importance of Amy's accomplishment when her research made the cover of a noteworthy science magazine. In another instance, Sheldon acted disrespectfully in Amy's laboratory when he was taking his required vacation time. The next day, however, he returns and after a few attempts, meekly apologizes to Amy, showing a vulnerable side of him that isn't usually seen considering his egotistical attitude. Perhaps the greatest leap forward in Sheldon's willingness to show his softer, more emotional side to Amy is when he voluntarily, without any prior prompt from Amy, held Amy's hand while Howard's Soyuz capsule was being launched into space. Amy was shocked at this, since Sheldon had acted confused and oblivious when she had tried holding his hand in The Alien Parasite Hypothesis. In season 6, he objects to Amy making him hold hands as he considers it unhygienic.
Religion
In contrast to his profoundly religious mother and devout Christian upbringing, Sheldon has no interest in religion - he tends to ignore or express dislike for religious celebrations such as Christmas, and wastes no time in bringing up the Pagan origins to each festival. Additionally, his scientific beliefs often come into conflict with the spiritual beliefs of his mother, Mary. Nevertheless, he has an agreement with his mother to attend church once a year, and once exclaims "Thank you, Jesus!" upon getting a strike in a bowling match against Wil Wheaton (his arch-enemy). His attitude towards God has been hinted at being of an Agnostic nature, when in the episode The Zarnecki Incursion he says "Why hast thou forsaken me deity whose existence I doubt..." Raj stated that one of the instance where Sheldon got food poisoning and he was "praying to the god he doesn't believe in to end it quickly". When he sees his mother having sex, he is very concerned about the hypocrisy shown by his mother having relations outside of marriage yet expounding the Bible to him throughout his childhood, even going as far to declare "don't turn to him, he's mad with you" when his mother uttered "oh dear Lord" during the conversation.
Legal Issues
Sheldon also appears to have problems understanding the law at times. He is shown to drop objects out his window into traffic without any regard, in addition to breaking into buildings. He has also been seen going into various places, such as a kid's play-area, and even began working at the Cheesecake Factory without being granted permission. He has expertise with picking locks and disarming alarm systems. Furthermore, the Department of Homeland Security notifies his mother when he acts contrary to federal law. As he states later, "Apparently, you can't hack into a top-secret government supercomputer and then try to buy uranium without the Department of Homeland Security tattling to your mother." This implies that Homeland Security is familiar with him, as instead of arresting and questioning him, they simply inform his mother and let her deal with him.
Traits
Though Sheldon has never been confirmed as having Asperger's syndrome, many of his traits and much of his behavior exemplify it. These qualities include social ineptitude, a lack of empathy, obsessiveācompulsive personality disorder, and many more traits which make him the most eccentric and bizarre of the characters in the show. Many of these traits are the reasons why Leonard finds him hard to live with and his friends find him so hard to be around. These include:
- Obsessiveācompulsive personality disorder: Sheldon exhibits a strict adherence to routine, such as doing specific recreational activities on specific days of the week, going to the bathroom on a specific time every morning, eating specific food items on specific days, being unable to reconcile changes to food orders, doing laundry on a specific day and time (every Saturday night at 8:15), or knocking on the door a certain number of times while repeating the name of the person he is seeking with a particular frequency ("[knock knock knock] Penny [knock knock knock] Penny [knock knock knock] Penny" being the most common.) Amy Farrah Fowler notifies this to Sheldon as a symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and she finds he is in denial over it. Sheldon labels all home utensils, appliances, etc., including his label maker. He also makes loud noises (or musical notes with a toy xylophone) in every theater before a movie, attempting to locate the "acoustic sweet spot". However, he can adapt to seats with sub-optimal conditions, such as suitable cushion densities and light dispersion, provided he has the opportunity to test them. Ironically, Sheldon has actually displayed great resilience in cases where his routines and/or living conditions have been severely altered. An example is the expedition to the North Pole; while Leonard, Raj, and Howard all thought it was horrible, he thought it was "a hoot and a half". Another is "The Bozeman Reaction", when he is able to stay awake long after his usual sleep time out of fear that the apartment will be burglarized. He also makes a habit of comparing his petty dilemmas with more serious situations and events, such as:
- sending "samples from a bag of excrement that had been lit on fire on [his] front porch for fingerprinting and DNA analysis" to the FBI Crime Lab and stupidly expecting a response (after 18 years, he, unsurprisingly, still hasn't heard back yet).
- calling Pest Control when a bluejay appeared outside his window, and admitting on the phone that he would have called the police if it was actually inside the apartment.
- calling the FBI when his World of Warcraft account had been hacked, then calling the local police when the former predictably hung up on him.
- Narcissistic personality disorder: Though not technically meeting all of the requirements for a formal diagnosis, Sheldon constantly points out his superiority among his friends and belittles everyone at regular intervals. Sheldon does not treat anyone as his equal, and believes that only his ideas are right. The one exception is Stephen Hawking. As a result, he does not take the suggestions of others seriously. He also refuses to admit he did anything wrong, often blaming mistakes on trivial reasons. Sheldon even admitted he was an egomaniac while drunk once in "The Habitation Configuration", although he quickly took it back. This implies he's at least somewhat aware of how he acts, but normally subconsciously denies it.
- Aphephobia: Sheldon can display symptoms of aphephobia, the fear of human contact. Sheldon admits this in "The Cooper/Kripke Inversion" stating he's been afraid of all forms of physical contact since childhood. However he also reveals he's been purposely trying to overcome it for Amy's sake.
- Mysophobia: He is constantly worried about others touching his food, washes his hands as often as he can, and showers twice daily. Leonard used his concerns for food to mock him in "The Einstein Approximation", as did Raj in "The Engagement Reaction". Penny has stated that he still has not learned to not to insult those who handle his food, to which Amy Farrah Fowler agrees. For example, when Penny touched one of his onion rings and put it back, Sheldon threw out all of the onion rings, saying that she had "contaminated their integrity." However, he does not seem to do much when Penny implies that she spits on his hamburger at the Cheesecake Factory.
- Ornithophobia: Sheldon has had horrible experiences with birds in his past, which has led to ornithophobia (a fear of birds). When Sheldon was a toddler, a hummingbird, which he describes as the vampire of the flower world, dived down into his stroller and tried to get at his apple juice in his Sippy cup. When he was seven, his neighbor's chicken got loose and chased him up the big elm tree in front of his house. When he was twelve, a magpie tried to take his retainer out of his mouth and when he was 16, a parrot in the pet store window called him "fat ass". He finally overcame this fear after he was forced to confront a black-throated Magpie-Jay.
- Hypochondriasis: He is extremely terrified about becoming sick. He became worried about Penny infecting him with influenza and subsequently contracted it. Another time, he wanted a full medical examination by Leonard's girlfriend, Dr. Stephanie Barnett, in order to discover the cause of a high-pitched noise in his head. This was later used against him by saying that he had an inflamed larynx and that he needed to stop talking immediately. When Howard's mother is sent to the hospital, Sheldon refuses to go due to exposure to pathogens and germs, until Penny confronts him. Though, he accidentally wanders into a bio-hazard room at the hospital, after fearing the restroom's cleanliness, and endures a two-week quarantine. Sheldon showers twice a day and washes his hands as often as he can. In addition, Sheldon has a red toothbrush that is kept in a PlexiglasĀ® case under a UV lamp.
- Inability to lie: When Sheldon is complicit in a lie; he exhausts all of his efforts in his almost always unsuccessful attempt to make it believable. Similarly, he cannot be entrusted with a secret because he develops nervous tics. However, it is easier for him to lie if he has prior knowledge of the deception or an "ironclad alibi" thought out in advance, as opposed to it being "impromptu dishonesty". Penny taught him a way to lie using sarcasm.
- Intolerance of people in his bedroom. One time, he was distraught when Penny entered his room in the middle of the night. On another occasion, Sheldon hesitantly let Penny in his bedroom to get a key for his desk to retrieve a USB flash drive, constantly reminding her that, far from creating a permanent easement, it was only one-time permission. However he doesn't seem to mind giving up his room to a guest as in "The Psychic Vortex", he had no problem with letting Martha sleep in his room while he went to do so in Leonard's room instead. Likewise he also gave up his room to Elizabeth in "The Plimpton Stimulation". This probably due to his southern heritage.
- Stage fright: While perfectly comfortable speaking to small groups, Sheldon cannot speak to crowds deemed large enough to trample him (36 adults or 70 children) without having a panic attack or fainting.
- Hemophobia: He has fainted at the sight of his own blood; this might just be part of his over active feelings of self preservation though, as he didn't seem to have a problem seeing Howard or Leonard's blood.
- Possible sadistic/psychopathic tendencies: Although Sheldon has never actually done anything psychopathic, particularly in the later season, he often implies, and sometimes directly states (always casually) a preference for cruel methods, or even killing. For example his suggestion to the problem of the elderly being alien to new technology, is to publicly execute a few to give the others some incentive to learn. He also suggested they killed Leonardās old bully when he stayed the night with them, pointing out they had the greatest opportunity to do so. He also mentioned he would like to put, and leave, Amy in a stockade in a public square, for lying to him. On one notable occasion, he even (admittedly half-heartedly) attempted to poison Kripke, when he wouldn't let him have Professor Rothman's office. As Sheldon doesn't lie, and doesn't understand Sarcasm, it can be taken he is generally serious.
He also keeps a record of what he considers faux pas "strikes", which he allocates to those who violate his self-imposed conditions. Upon receiving three strikes, Sheldon gives them the choice of apologizing, being "banished" from the apartment for a year, or taking a "class". For many of the aforementioned characteristics, Sheldon's friends often consider him "insane" or "crazy" despite Sheldon's repetition of another catchphrase "I'm not insane/crazy! My mother had me tested." His mother later confirms this to Leonard; the doctor said he was sane, but she regretted not following up with a specialist in Houston. Despite Sheldon's personality disorders and difficult habits, his friends usually just do what he says because it is easier. It has also been revealed that Sheldon has a bifurcated uvula, something which he is self-conscious about.
Sheldon's Spot on the Couch
- Main article: Sheldon's Spot
Sheldon in his "spot".
The most notable feature of Sheldon's obsessive-compulsive disorder is his refusal to sit anywhere other than his designated spot on the far left cushion of the couch in his apartment, which he considers his "single point of consistency in an ever-changing world" and "the singular location in space around which revolves my entire universe", exceeding his love for his mother. He describes his spot on the couch as being his point 0, 0, 0, 0 if his life were a Cartesian coordinate plan. Sheldon regularly reproaches Penny and other people for sitting in his spot. Even disruptions to this location are enough to disturb him. Although he did allow Penny to sit in his spot in the first episode, as well as Howard, for a short time in "The Apology Insufficiency", only 94 seconds later, he reclaims his spot. As well as his designated spot in the apartment, if Sheldon is ever in a different area where he is going to sit down, such as Penny's apartment, he has to choose the best sitting location based on such things as optimal television viewing, lighting, airflow, and cushion density. In "The Werewolf Transformation", when his barber was ill and chaos ruled his life, he didn't object to Penny sitting in his spot. In "The Mommy Observation" Leonard reveals that Sheldon has a very sensitive butt and can tell when someone was sitting in his spot.
Quotes
- "Bazinga!"
- āQuote when he makes a joke
- "(knock x 3) Penny! (knock x 3) Penny! (knock x 3) Penny!"
- āQuote from various episodes whenever he knocks on the door of Penny's apartment.
- "That's no reason to cry. One cries because one is sad. For example, I cry because others are stupid, and it makes me sad."
- āQuote from "The Gorilla Experiment"
- "On the contrary. I found the Grinch to be a relatable, engaging character, and I was really with him right up to the point that he succumbed to social convention and returned the presents and saved Christmas. What a buzz kill that was!"
- āQuote from "The Maternal Congruence"
- "I'm attempting to view my work as a fleeting peripheral image so as to engage the superior colliculus of my brain."
- āQuote from "The Einstein Approximation"
- "How could somebody possibly think weāre going to blow up the moon? Thatās a great question."
- āQuote from "The Lunar Excitation"
- "WHEATON......................................................................................................!"
- āQuote from various episodes, usually after Wheaton messes with him
- "I am not crazy, my mother had me tested."
- āQuote from various episodes, always said after someone calls him crazy.
- "Put it on the back burner. Anyway, it occurs to me, if I ever did perfect a time machine, Iād just go into the past and give it to myself, thus eliminating the need for me to invent it in the first place."
- āQuote from "The Luminous Fish Effect"
- "My mother says when we deceive people for personal gain we make Jesus cry."
- āQuote from "The Classified Materials Turbulence"
Relationships
Platonic
Leonard Hofstadter
Sheldon: Go team Leonard!
Sheldon is the best friend of Leonard, as they live together and are accustomed to tolerating each other's quirks ever since Sheldon put out an ad for a roommate with a list of criteria to follow. When Leonard first met Sheldon he had a bunch of rules that Leonard had to follow. Despite Sheldon sometimes making remarks to the contrary, he appreciates Leonard and assures Leonard that his friend will not die alone. He even once told Leonard that he platonically loves him, when Leonard had to face his old high-school bully, Jimmy Speckerman. When Penny asks Leonard why he deals with Sheldon, he explains that Sheldon has actually saved his neck a few times, such as when he stopped him from being incinerated by his own improperly formulated rocket fuel and didn't tell on him to the landlord, the police or the Department of Homeland Security. This incident also lead to the destruction of the elevator, as Sheldon had just enough time to put the explosive contents of the container into the elevator before it exploded. Leonard also, more than all of Sheldon's other friends understands him the most, as viewed in many scenes where when all hopes failed to get Sheldon to participate in something, Leonard will be the last resort to come up with something successful. When Penny and Sheldon had a spat due to Penny sitting in his spot and touching his food and later refused to apologize to him, which resulted her being banished from the apartment, Penny came up with her own set of revenge, including banishing Sheldon from the Cheesecake Factory and messing up with Sheldon's Laundry Night. When things got really ugly between the two, a fed up Leonard secretly gave Penny Sheldon's mother's number, telling her it is Sheldon's Kryptonite. The feud ended after that, with Sheldon, clueless to the fact that it was Leonard who helped Penny, told Penny that she played well. Another instance was when Penny tried her hands at opening her own business by selling Penny Blossoms. When they had to stay awake all night to help Penny meet her order, a sleepy Sheldon refused coffee and decided to head to bed instead, leaving the rest to finish up by themselves. A frustrated Penny looked on to Leonard to do something and Leonard did, by saying to Sheldon that without his insight and leadership this entire enterprise will surely fail, which prompted Sheldon to change his mind and drink coffee. In "The Septum Deviation", Sheldon objects to him have elective nasal surgery due to the risks of surgery indicating that he really cares for Leonard despite his condescension. Sheldon and Leonard have co-authored at least two scientific papers together.
In "The Proton Displacement" (S7E07), Leonard explains why he puts up with Sheldon and takes Sheldon as his friend:
- "Look, I know he can be aggravating, but what you have to remember is that he is not doing it on purpose. It's just how he is. He is also loyal and trustworthy, and we have fun together...You know what, Sheldon is the smartest person that I have ever met. He is a little broken and he needs me. I guess I need him, too."
In "The Space Probe Disintegration", Leonard tells Sheldon that his attitude is why he and Penny are not living together. After a tearful period thinking about them him moving out, Sheldon lets him go one night a week to stay at Penny's. Sheldon still sleeps on her couch that night.
In "The Skywalker Incursion" the guys drive up to George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch headquarters to see if they could get in. They can't so Sheldon rushes the gate, gets caught by being tased and almost gets the two of them arrested. Leonard is mad, but still calls it an adventure.
Penny
Penny (left) with Sheldon (right) in front of Sheldon's white board with string theory equations.
Despite Penny not being a smart person nor sharing many of the group's interests, and having almost constant fights with Sheldon in the early episodes, they became close friends, such as when Penny cares for Sheldon during illness or when Penny takes him in when he is locked out of his apartment while his friends are in Las Vegas. Sheldon returns the favor as he cares for Penny when she dislocates her shoulder. In all of these instances, the story line ends with one of them singing "Soft Kitty," a song Sheldon's mother used to sing to him when he was sick. On the one hand, Sheldon and Penny spend a lot of time getting on each other's nerves: Sheldon often mentions how uneducated or untidy Penny is, while Penny likes to irritate him by sitting in his spot, messing with food, and they once started a futile war (Penny blocked Sheldon from doing his laundry on his laundry day, and he responded by exposing her clothes and underwear outside the window). Also when he asks Penny for something or uses her as an example, he ends up inadvertently insulting. However, they also efficiently team up, for example to plan Leonard's birthday (Sheldon only participated when Penny blackmailed him into helping) or to develop Penny's "Penny Blossoms" business, singing along to sailors songs to motivate each other. They end up spending a lot of time together as two close friends to help each other and give each other advice (Penny helping to find a suit for Sheldon for an awards ceremony, or seeking Stan Lee's address for him because he couldn't meet him as the other members of the group did; Sheldon teaching Penny physics to help her in her relationship with Leonard). On a few occasions, they also appear to share a sort of intimacy that Sheldon doesn't have with anyone else: they both take care of each other when they don't feel well; they stayed together in the flat, cranky and grumpy, as they had both caught the flu after a hug they had exchanged; Sheldon has an immediate, very nervous and alarmed reaction when he hears Penny calling for his help from her flat; they sing together "Soft Kitty" as a round in a kind intimate moment; Sheldon adds an amused "Bazinga" to one of Penny's jokes, to which she replies with a tender "Hmm..." Often when Sheldon seeks advice or help from Penny he begins his request with "you're so good at...." one of her faults and ends up insulting her though she usually let's it pass with a "WTF" expression.
Sheldon acknowledges Penny as one of his closest friends (along with Leonard and Raj), while he considers that Howard is a "treasured acquaintance," though he has known him a lot longer than Penny. Also, when Penny and Leonard break up, Sheldon still considers Penny a friend and makes dinner plans, which he tries to hide when Howard informs him that it is inappropriate behavior and "bros come before ho's." He actually goes through a lot of trouble (hiding frozen hot dogs in his pants, confronting a huge threatening dog ... ) just to dine with her, though he's already been forced to eat a whole meal with the boys. In the end, Leonard and Penny in a way share custody of Sheldon, taking him to Disneyland and out to buy new shoes.
The interaction between Sheldon and Penny has been praised by critics. James Chamberlain of IGN wrote: "Cuoco and Parsons are great in their own right, but when put together, they truly shine." Matt Roush of TV Guide said that Sheldon and Penny's "scenes and episodes together are usually Big Bang at its best." Todd WanDerVerff of The A.V. Club wrote that they "made such an inspired odd coupling that at times, it seemed as though the entire show were about them" and their chemistry "has some of the rattle and rhythm of the great comedic duos".[73] Chuck Lorre stated that Sheldon and Penny have "become a natural comic pairing" and that they "bounce off each other beautifully."
In "The Intimacy Acceleration", Penny and Sheldon conduct a psychological experiment which should result in the couple instantly falling in love. Sheldon wants to do it because he thinks its poppycock, and Penny does it because she gets to ask Sheldon a lot of personal questions that he has to answer honestly. They admit a lot of truth about themselves like Penny wishes she were as smart as the others and that she uses comedy to cover up insecurities. Finally they stare into each others eyes for four minutes and decide that they do have a new found intimacy though just as a brother and sister.
Rajesh Koothrappali
Sheldon and Raj's relationship is rather complicated. Sheldon once offered help to Koothrappali by giving him a job under his supervision, which Raj reluctantly accepted to save him from getting deported back to India. Raj is easily annoyed with much of Sheldon's antics, but has grown accustomed to them. Before the boys went with Sheldon on the Arctic Expedition, Raj explained to Howard that the reason he puts up with Sheldon is because of his religion; 3 months of suffering at the Arctic Circle with Sheldon would mean he (Raj) would be reborn in the next life as 'a well-hung billionaire with wings'. Raj, as much as he hates Sheldon's opinions on every certain situation and his behavior, considers Sheldon as a good friend.
Raj and Sheldon at the movies.
Howard Wolowitz
Sheldon and Howard's relationship is purely existent, albeit extremely complicated. Sheldon often makes fun of Howard for not having a Doctorate. In "The Apology Insufficiency", Sheldon (unintentionally) angers Howard by revealing details to the FBI that prevent him from obtaining a much needed security clearance. Howard refuses to accept Sheldon's apology, until Sheldon gives Howard his spot on the couch, prompting Howard to forgive Sheldon. Howard, much like Raj and Leonard, are quite used to his inflated ego. On the other hand, he and Sheldon are shown to get along well - He tried to help Sheldon learn to drive on a simulator he created, and Sheldon did help with Howard's creations. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two has its ups and downs. In "The Parking Spot Escalation", they fight over Sheldon's parking place which he never needed since he didn't even have a car. The fight escalates and even Amy and Bernadette go after each other. Finally Raj gets Howard to give up his space. Sheldon didn't like Howard being the better man, so Sheldon is letting Howard use it until he has a car or gets a Batmobile. Howard tried to improve their friendship in The Friendship Turbulence by taking him to Houston to get a tour of NASA and visit his mother and succeeded when both admit that they respect each other as friends and their lives would be empty without each other. In "The Comic Book Store Regeneration", when the gang receives the devastating news that Howard's mother died, Sheldon gave Howard some words of comfort: When Sheldon lost his father, he didn't have any friends to help him through it... but Howard does have friends.
With Howard on a trip to Houston.
Wil Wheaton
Growing up, Sheldon idolized Wil Wheaton. Wesley Crusher, Wil Wheaton's character on "Star Trek: The Next Generation", had an eidetic memory just like him. Sheldon was such a fan that in 1995, he traveled ten hours by bus to the fourth annual Dixie-Trek Convention in Jackson, Mississippi, wearing his Star Fleet Academy cadet uniform in order to meet Wil Wheaton and get him to autograph his mint in-package Wesley Crusher action figure. However, his arduous journey, during which he had to twice violate his personal rule against relieving himself on board a moving vehicle, was for naught; although advertised to appear, he did not show up. It was at that moment, he vowed eternal hatred for Wil Wheaton.
Cooper vs. Wheaton!
In "The Creepy Candy Coating Corollary", Sheldon entered a Mystic Warlords of Ka'a tournament with Raj at Stuart's comic book shop in hopes of battling Wheaton, and put his name on the sign-up sheet as "DIE WILL WHEATON DIE". During this tournament, Sheldon utters in Klingon to Wheaton from across the room, "Revenge is a dish best served cold." When Raj and Sheldon get to the final round, they must face Wil and Stuart. Sheldon explains logically what cards must be in Wheaton's hand and how he is able to beat them. After Sheldon informs Wheaton why he hates him, Wil claims his grandma had died, knowing that Sheldon shares a special bond with his grandmother and would empathize with this plight. Sheldon falls for the ruse and throws the game, only to learn shortly thereafter that he had lied, causing him to reaffirm Wheaton's status as his mortal enemy in a display of rage akin to Adm. Kirk's reaction towards Khan's threat of marooning him on Regula in the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. His true reason for not showing up is revealed in "The Russian Rocket Reaction" -- he was on 'Hollywood Squares".
Wheaton messed with Sheldon in a bowling game in S03E19 "The Wheaton Recurrence". During said game, Sheldon named his team "The Wesley Crushers". In this encounter, Wheaton also managed to cause Penny to break up with Leonard through deceit, by upsetting Penny (who was on Sheldon's bowling team) enough to make her leave the bowling alley, Wheaton's team would go on to win the bowling match over Sheldon's team, with the corresponding bet associated with the match (the losing team would have to dress up in the costume choice of the winning team).
Wheaton appears again in "The 21-Second Excitation" at a showing of the movie, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," with 21 seconds of deleted footage. After Wheaton and his crew were allowed to cut in line by the security guard, Sheldon exclaimed with his impersonation of Patrick Stewart's accent, "As Captain Jean-Luc Picard once said, the line must be drawn here... THIS far, NO farther!" Wheaton later boasted about his great seats and told Sheldon to 'suck it' via Twitter. When Sheldon, Leonard, Raj and Howard were eventually denied entrance to the theater, Sheldon stole the film cans containing the footage, resulting in an angry mob led by Wheaton chasing the four out of the theater" In "The Russian Rocket Reaction", Wheaton invited Leonard and Sheldon to his place for a party. Here, Wheaton gave Sheldon his last mint condition, autographed Wesley Crusher action figure. While Sheldon forgave and hugged Wil Wheaton, Brent Spiner (who played Lt. Data in Star Trek: Next Generation) approached them, saying he "hadn't seen one of these Wesley Crusher Action Figures in ages," and proceeded to take the mint-condition-still-in-box action figure away from Sheldon. After tearing the packaging, Spiner became Sheldon's new archenemy.
Romances (Usually one-sided until Amy)
Of all the main characters of the show, Sheldon is presumed to be asexual and has displayed absolutely no interest in pursuing a sexual relationship with anyone. He tries to avoid all human physical and emotional contact. He has, however, had a few opportunities to "get it on" - maybe more opportunities than the other characters. Being true to his personality, though, he never seems to realize it. However, the introduction of Amy Farrah Fowler into the show has changed this aspect of him, at least slightly. Even though Amy used to be a girl, who was his friend, but not his girlfriend, and now is his girlfriend, she is the closest person who may be romantically-linked to Sheldon. Though, their relationship used to be nothing more than that of friends, or, as Sheldon put it, "a relationship of the minds".
Lalita Gupta
Lalita Gupta.
Lalita was arranged to be married to Raj. They went on a date together which gradually deteriorated as alcohol made him obnoxious. When Sheldon arrived at the bar, he thought she looked similar to an Indian fairy tale princess from a bedtime story his mother used to read to him when he was sick. When he told her, she was flattered and ended up dumping Raj and going out for dinner with Sheldon. When he was asked about it the next day, he simply said that they ate and discussed dental hygiene. He didn't seem to realize that he technically was on a date with her and when Leonard asked him if he was going to see her again he looked puzzled said "why would I see her again?, I already have a dentist".
Ramona Nowitzki
Ramona Nowitzki.
Ramona was a huge admirer of Sheldon and had an obvious crush on him, which he didn't seem to notice. In S02E06 "The Cooper-Nowitzki Theorem", she asked him out for dinner and brought it to his apartment. After that, she began spending more and more time with him, haunting the apartment night and day walking around like the T-X terminator from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. She prevented Sheldon from doing anything recreational like playing Halo, paintball or watching Battlestar Galactica so he could focus on his work that he was so enamored with. Eventually, he made a breakthrough. When she suggested they share credit, he simply responded "Get out!", after which she angrily left.
Martha
Martha.
When Raj brought Sheldon to a faculty mixer to act as wingman in S03E12 "The Psychic Vortex", they picked up a girl named Abby (Danica McKellar) and her friend, Martha (Jen Drohan), brought them to Sheldon and Leonard's apartment and played Rock Band with them. While Abby and Raj hit it off, Martha became interested in Sheldon. The two enjoyed a few stimulating discussions together at their second meeting, during which Raj and Abby, "were getting busy in the living room," Martha visited Sheldon's room in the middle of the night and asked to come in, hoping for sex. Misinterpreting this, Sheldon went to sleep in Leonard's room and left Martha alone in his.
Amy Farrah Fowler
- Main article: Sheldon and Amy
Sheldon and Amy.
Sheldon first met Amy via a dating site where Howard and Raj sneakily set up an account for him in the season 3 finale, "The Lunar Excitation". Eventually, they found a perfect match for him and agreed to meet her at a cafƩ. When they told Sheldon, he refused to do it, believing dating sites to be "hokum". However, he was blackmailed into doing it when Raj said he had hidden a dirty sock in his apartment and would not remove it unless Sheldon went on the date. When they arrived, Sheldon had doubts until he met Amy, who acted exactly like Sheldon. She only agreed to come on the date as she and her mother have an agreement that Amy would date at least once a year. Sheldon noticed they had a lot in common and bought her a beverage of tepid water. Raj and Howard regretted what they had done, with Howard saying, "Good God, what have we done?".
In the season 4 premiere, "The Robotic Manipulation," Sheldon reveals that he has been talking to Amy for four months online and via text messaging, after they first met. Penny is amazed that Sheldon has a girlfriend and Howard and Raj call Sheldon and Amy, "Shamy." Sheldon denies that Amy is his girlfriend and that they mainly talk about Sheldon's theoretical physics, Amy's neurobiology and the possibility of having a child together via in-vitro fertilization. Penny convinces Sheldon to go on a proper date with Amy first, before he actually decides to have a child. She eventually ends up on the date with them, as she had to drive them to the restaurant. While there, Penny tries to make conversation, but fails. After the subject of Sheldon's first date comes up, Sheldon calculates the number of men Penny would have dated. He ends up with 193, with 31 sexual encounters. Amy then innocently asks if Penny feels like a "slut" and reveals that she has had 128 sexual encounters (if you include stimulation of the brain to induce orgasm). Eventually, Penny convinces Sheldon not to have a child with Amy by threatening to tell Sheldon's highly-religious mother — who would likely frown upon a test tube, surrogate, out-of-wedlock grandchild.
In episode 3 of season 4, Amy and Sheldon break up for a period of time after an argument over whose field of science is superior. This results in Sheldon buying a clowder of cats, which worries Leonard. So he calls Sheldon's mother, who is unusually surprised at what she sees with Sheldon. She then calls Amy and uses the technique of reverse psychology which Leonard instantly picks up on, but Sheldon is completely oblivious to. She tells Sheldon that it was a good thing he and Amy broke up because they are completely incompatible. Sheldon is instantly offended, so to prove his mother wrong, he offers Amy to reconcile, which she agrees after a negotiation on the amount of responsibility Sheldon has to accept for the break up (Amy offered 80%, Sheldon countered with 40%, settling at 65%). Afterwards, Sheldon gives away $20 to anybody willing to adopt his cats.
In episode 5 of season 4, Amy requests Sheldon to meet her mother, who terrifies him and he tries many ways to avoid her, as he thinks she has fallen in love with him. However, Amy says that she only wants to be friends with Sheldon and wants to pretend to be Boyfriend/Girlfriend to please her mother so that she will be silent on that matter. Sheldon freaks out Amy's mother a bit, which is what Amy wanted him to be, when they tell her about their "fake" sex life. Her relationship with Sheldon is complex; it began as a purely intellectual friendship which consisted solely of text messaging, but at some urging from Penny, develops into a platonic friendship with dynamics similar to a romantic relationship, although not sexually intimate.
They later pretend to have had a sexual encounter (the made-up details of which included Amy becoming pregnant) as an experiment to see how long it would take the gossip to spread throughout their social circle,
Sheldon and Amy's first kiss.
which Sheldon notes was "less than 24 hours." In "The Agreement Dissection", she became drunk during a "girl's night" with Penny and Bernadette, at which Sheldon was present to escape Priya, and danced with Sheldon, after which Sheldon walked her home. She invites him in and, after advising him on how to deal with Priya, flirts with and then kisses Sheldon to which he responds "Fascinating". After she throws up and passes out, Sheldon puts a towel under her head as a pillow and leaves (before doing this he regulated Amy's kitchen timer, which was making him go crazy).
The next morning, a hung over Amy video-calls Sheldon, and he informs her of the kiss, and when Amy admits she is unsure where to go from there, they agree to pretend the entire events of the evening never occurred.
Later, she invites Leonard to a wedding, explaining that she'd invited Sheldon before, but he "acted like a child." She and Leonard end up having a rather good time, though by the end of the night he'd sprained his groin dancing the Hokey Pokey and she's convinced he's in love with her. However, when Leonard tells Sheldon about the night, the way he describes it makes it seem as though he and Amy had sex. Sheldon bops Leonard rather hard on the shoulder, and states very firmly that Amy is not Leonard's, leaving his friend totally confused.
In "The Isolation Permutation", Amy got depressed after Penny and Bernadette went bridesmaid dress shopping without her and Sheldon ended up comforting her. First she asked for sex due to wanting physical intimacy and the couple made counter offers and settled with cuddling, something Sheldon was reluctant to do.
A recurring topic for discussion among audience of the show is whether Amy may be the first person that Sheldon may have developed romantic feelings for, though he himself may not have realized it yet. It is clear that Amy is attracted to Sheldon, as witnessed in her many attempts to have some form of physical contact with him, such as kissing him while she was drunk, holding his hands and said that it was an experiment, and during the counter offers, she attempted to get Sheldon to agree to get into bed with her and French-kissing. Amy had also, in a scene in Season 5's "The Pulled Groin Extrapolation", told Leonard at a wedding that he has "a kinda-sorta-boyfriend playing with a model train and you don't hear me bitching about it", a clear reference to Sheldon. In "The Ornithophobia Diffusion", when Sheldon finally overcame his fear of birds and appeared infatuated by the bird, to the point he called him his little "Lovey-dovey". A slightly jealous Amy replied "guess you gotta have hollow bones to get some sugar around here".
Sheldon, while his feelings for Amy remain ambiguous, clearly cares for her at least. In "The Isolation Permutation", several events highlighted his care for Amy. When a devastated Amy wanted to be alone and did not respond to any form of communications Sheldon attempted to reach her, Sheldon grew worried and distracted, till Leonard suggested that they go over to her place to check up on her. While getting ready to leave their apartment, Sheldon shared news that a bob cat was spotted near Amy's place and Leonard responded that he does not think that Amy has been eaten by a bob cat. A shocked Sheldon said that he was only sharing a piece of news and now, thanks to Leonard, he is worried whether Amy has indeed been eaten by a bob cat. Later, at Amy's apartment, when she told Sheldon that she wanted to be left alone, Sheldon asked, rather awkwardly whether Amy would like to talk about what's troubling her, though he did add that he has no problem if Amy says no. Afterwards, when Amy counter offered with him regarding human intimacy and physical contact, Sheldon eventually agreed to cuddle with her. When a drunk Amy called Sheldon as he was building his Lego Death Star, he and Leonard went to see her at the parking lot near the liquor store when she called Leonard "Lil' Leonard" and Sheldon "Cuddles", a term which earned a frown from Leonard. Sheldon quickly retorted with "Yes, Cuddles. We cuddled. Grow up Leonard!", showing that he no longer cares about what his friends may say regarding his relationship with Amy.
In "The Flaming Spittoon Acquisition", Sheldon at first claimed he was fine with Stuart asking Amy out on a date. Later, when he went to the comic book store with Leonard to return Leonard's Wild West and Witches expansion pack and found that someone else has replaced Stuart since he is out for coffee with Amy, he started feeling jealous. Leonard asked him whether he was okay, but his reassurance on the matter looked doubtful. At the university cafeteria, as the guys were discussing the Wild West and Witches deluxe set, Sheldon was checking Stuart's Facebook page, and the guys were surprised to see that he has actually friended Stuart. Raj suggested that he did so just to keep tabs on Stuart's date with Amy. Leonard told him to acknowledge his feelings for Amy while Howard told him to challenge Stuart to a fight. Sheldon said that he could not care less about the date, but ended up unfriending all three of them. Later, he went to Penny's apartment and asked Penny out on a date, to signal that he did not care about Amy and Stuart. When Penny told him that he only wanted to do so to make Amy jealous, he denied and wondered why everyone else is obsessed with Amy and Stuart and added whether those two have more pumpkin lattes or will have intercourse, showing that he did keep himself updated with the details of their date(s). Penny told him to buck up and talk to Amy.
Sheldon ended up interrupting Amy and Stuart's date at the movie by going into the movie they were watching and sitting next to Amy. When Amy asked what he was doing there, he covered up by saying that the thought of Amy sitting in a darkened theater with a character like Stuart is repellent. Amy apologized and influenced him to man up to his feelings by saying that their current relationship status allows her to e in any repellent situation she likes. This was when Sheldon decided to propose an alteration to their relationship paradigm by saying he would no longer object if they characterize her as his girlfriend, but other than that nothing will change in terms of physical or otherwise. Amy pushed Sheldon to try saying that again without the negative, but he refused so she provoked him by sliding towards Stuart and saying hi to him, following which Sheldon relented and asked properly if Amy is willing to be his girlfriend. She agreed and he left immediately. Later on, Sheldon waited inside Amy's apartment as she finishes her date. When Amy and Stuart was conversing outside her apartment, Sheldon told them to quickly wrap things up and when Amy and Stuart gave each other a friendly hug, Sheldon immediately retaliated by asking Stuart to take the hint that Amy has said goodnight. When Amy asked him how he entered her apartment, he complained whether she will keep nagging like this now that she is his girlfriend and introduced her to The Relationship Agreement. Amy did not seem to like the agreement although she said it is romantic. Sheldon told her she could get herself a lawyer. Amy agreed to the agreement anyway. As of now, the two have officially become a couple.
In "The Beta Test Initiation", Amy helped Sheldon with his YouTube series on vexillology entitled "Fun With
Sheldon Copper presents Fun with Flags.
Flags". At the beginning, she even made a suggestion, which Sheldon described as brilliant (highly unusual, since he normally dismisses other people's comments about his work). In one episode where Sheldon was describing the Bavarian flag, he even dressed up as a Bavarian and made Amy dressed up as a pretzel.
In "The Friendship Contraction", Sheldon asked Amy to take him to the dentist after all of his other friends refused, and Leonard had signed the clause on The Roommate Agreement to reduce his and Sheldon's relationship to mere acquaintances. However, Amy was busy with work and could not drive him. He tried to make her guilty by telling her that as his girlfriend, she had to cater to his needs, and even to the extent of asking her "where has the magic gone?" Amy looked upset at his comments and Penny ended up defending her.
In "The Vacation Solution", Sheldon decided to work at Amy's laboratory with her for a week, after he was forced to undergo his mandatory vacation. Once there, he was appalled by the tasks Amy told him to do, which were menial given his standards, such as washing the beakers and counting spores. Surprisingly, he could not accomplish any of the tasks right. Eventually, he confronted her on the matter. Amy reasoned that even if he was a genius, she could not assign him difficult tasks because he had no experience working in Biology. Sheldon retaliated by telling her that she was just afraid that he would be better than her. Annoyed, Amy let him slice the brain specimen she was working on. He ended up cutting his thumb and fainted at the sight of his own blood. After talking to Penny, Sheldon went back to apologize to Amy for his behavior, however, being Sheldon; he could not offer a sincere and direct apology. Amy downright refused to accept anything, but a real apology so finally; he managed to mutter up a short "sorry". Amy accepted and told him to start washing the beakers again.
In "The Werewolf Transformation", Sheldon missed out on his regular haircut schedule, due to his regular barber being hospitalized. This event affected his daily routine because he could not get over not getting his haircut on time. When he was over at Amy's apartment, on their scheduled "girlfriend-boyfriend sing-a-long night", he could not concentrate. Amy suggested he go to Supercuts, but he refused, equating Supercuts to "Sodom and Gomorrah with mousse". She then suggested he grew out his hair, because she thought he would look sexy with long hair. He refused to that as well. Later, Sheldon spiraled even more out of control by playing bongos at 3 a.m. and went to her apartment. The next day, when Leonard and Penny came over to pick him up, Amy revealed that she initially thought Sheldon's presence last night was a musical booty call. Sheldon finally relented to have his hair cut by Penny, after Amy convinced him by saying that there was no hair on her body she would not let Penny trim.
In "The Weekend Vortex", Sheldon agreed to go to Amy's Aunt Flora's 93rd birthday party. He began to have doubts on going after the guys told him that they would be having a 48-hour Star Wars online gaming marathon, like in the old days. He tried to persuade Amy to let him stay instead, but she refused, saying that she followed all his protocols in The Relationship Agreement. Sheldon gave in, albeit unwillingly. The next day, when they were about to begin their journey, Amy discovered that Sheldon had brought along his laptop with him. Sheldon told her that he had found a way to compromise, by being physically present at her aunt's party, but virtually present for the online gaming. Amy told him that it would make him appear rude since her family would want to talk to him. He told her that he will have his headset on so that he could not hear them in the first place. Upset, Amy sarcastically told him that if gaming was more important to him than his commitments to her, he could stay. He did not get her meaning and opted to stay. Amy was later seen upset and having gone to the party alone. She confided in Penny and Penny persuaded her to make a scene. The girls later barged into Sheldon and Leonard's apartment, while they were still gaming. Amy told Sheldon that she was going to embarrass him in front of his friends. She told him that she was leaving him for Arman, the miniature horse breeder. He asked her who Arman was, but she tripped up on her words and failed to continue the ruse. Penny helped by telling Sheldon he hurt her by backing out on his words. Sheldon finally understood her and offered her Cooper Coupons to make it up to her.
In "The Launch Acceleration", Sheldon came over to Amy's apartment for their scheduled monthly Date Night for a home-cooked dinner, despite his idea of a hot date is crossing the street and going to the Lego store to buy a tiny Indiana Jones Lego. He found out that the reason Amy requested to have their Date Night at her place was to get their relationship moving forward, just like their friends'. He was reluctant because he thought that considering he has known her for two years and he was already at her place after dark, their relationship could not go any faster. However, Amy, having anticipated his response decided to achieve her goal by using her skills in neurobiology. She wanted to try to create his emotional attachment to her, just like his attachments to his
Amy and Sheldon playing Doctor, Star Trek style.
mother and superheroes, by making him happy. Their Date Night was full of the things he likes, such as Super Mario Brothers' theme song as the background music, drinking strawberry Quik, and being served spaghetti with hot dogs cut up in it. Amy's plan seemed to be going well because Sheldon immediately responded with they should do it more often. After the night, it was shown that Sheldon had become distracted and he admitted to Leonard over their game of 3D chess that he was starting to develop affectionate feelings for Amy at inappropriate times, though not in a sexual way. He also revealed that Amy took her campaign even further past their Date Night by arranging for him to become an Amtrak junior conductor, something extremely special since it was only open for kids. He even got to blow the whistle. At the end of the episode, Sheldon and Amy were caught by Leonard playing Doctor, Star Trek style, with Sheldon lying on the couch while Amy, fully dressed in a Nurse Chapel uniform from Star Trek The Original Series, performed medical check-up on him.
In "The Countdown Reflection", Amy told Bernadette that she thinks Sheldon's eidetic memory is sexy and proceeded to ask him to recite the ingredients in Pringles. Later, at the City Hall while waiting for Howard and Bernadette to get married (they did not however, manage to squeeze in for the day), Amy asked Sheldon whether being at there and witnessing a lot of couple in love makes him thinking, but he did not get what she meant and ended up exposing Leonard's failed proposal to Penny in the previous episode to all their friends. During the wedding ceremony, as Sheldon was addressing Howard and Bernadette, Amy looked displeased when Sheldon told them that he hopes they find happiness together as he has found being all by himself. However, during Howard's launch into space, Sheldon did something completely contradictory to his statement, by grabbing Amy's hand as he said "Boldly go, Howard Wolowitz".
At the beginning of season six, Amy and Sheldon are shown regularly dating each of "The Date Night Variable"
Amy's reaction to Sheldon's from the heart confession.
, Sheldon invites Raj along for their second anniversary dinner much to Amy's annoyance. After Raj leaves, Amy demands a statement from the heart from Sheldon or she was leaving him. Sheldon provided some paraphrase romantic dialogue from the first Spider-Man movie. Amy says that she'll "take it". In "The Decoupling Fluctuation", at the movies, Amy requires Sheldon to now hold her hand though Sheldon thinks the idea is silly and unhygienic In "The Habitation Configuration", Amy is directing an episode of "Fun with Flags" guest starring Wil Wheaton. While not liking his acting, the two get into an argument and Amy leaves. Sheldon is first caught in the middle and then naively thinks that Amy is solving the problem by leaving. He eventually learns that he should support Amy in disagreements.
In "The Parking Spot Escalation", Amy backs up Sheldon in his fight for Howard's parking place, helping him put his name back on the space and leaving her car parked in it. After she finds it towed she confronts Bernadette and ends up smashing her "bestie", Penny, in her face breaking her nose. The next episode "The Fish Guts Displacement", Sheldon finds Amy has the flu and she asks him to take care of her per their Relationship Agreement. First Sheldon says that that is meant for her to take care of him and then leaves. Moments later Sheldon has a change of heart and tells her that they have a written agreement and that he cares about her well beings so he will take care of her though he wants to get through it quickly. Later when he finds that her temperature hasn't gone down, he tells he that she isn't trying. Amy complains about his bed side manner and just wants to go to sleep. Sheldon says that that is not acceptable because he isn't through taking care of her. He has to put a rag on her forehead, sing to her (probably Soft Kitty) and rub Vicks vapor rub on her chest. Sick Amy sits up surprised and wants to start with the Vicks with Sheldon not realizing the sexual aspects. Sheldon tells her that it may tingle and Amy replies that she is counting on that. A few days later Bernadette visits her and learns that Amy is feeling fine and is enjoying Sheldon taking care of her especially since he has started bathing her. A couple of days later Sheldon has the results of a throat culture which says that she is no longer sick. Amy apologizes. Sheldon is disappointed because he thought their relationship was based on trust and mutual respect. He says that she needs to be punished so that that doesn't happen again. She thinks she should not be allowed to see the next Star Trek movie, but Sheldon feels that that is too harsh a punishment. He prefers being put in the stocks in public, but doesn't think that he needs a permit for that. Instead he decides to give her a spanking which she enjoys. In "The Cooper/Kripke Inversion", Sheldon lies to Kripke about sleeping with Amy after Kripke performs better than him on a project they were working on together. Also, Sheldon enjoys being held and consoled by Amy when he is very upset about Kripke. In "The Spoiler Alert Segmentation", Leonard moves out and Amy tries to convince him that she would be his ideal new roommate. She is familiar with all his habits and his personality quirks that others fine rave inducing, she thinks are cute as a button. Sheldon is uncomfortable with this much increased intimacy with Amy and also learns from Penny that she doesn't want Leonard to move in with her. Sheldon finally tells Amy that she can't move in and that it's Penny's fault. Amy confronts Penny who tells Sheldon why he didn't tell Amy that he didn't want her to move in instead of blaming it on her. Amy calls Sheldon a coward, which he agrees with and Amy goes off to live with Penny. In "The Tangible Affection Proof", Sheldon has Alex buy Amy her Valentine's Day gift and she does such a great job with the third option, the signed brain cell print that Sheldon keeps it. Amy shows up after canceling their romantic dinner and tells him that they'll eat pizza and watch one of his Star Trek/War movies since that is what he really loves. Sheldon shows Amy that she is now his emergency point of contact at the university which sends Amy into tears. He really trusts her.
Sheldon and Amy back at the movies again with Stuart.
In "The Love Spell Potential", after Amy was upset about the notion that their characters should have sex, as it was not going to happen in real life, Sheldon was sent to comfort her. Although initially unwilling, he listened to her complain about how the others thought their relationship was a joke. Sheldon responded by saying he didn't think that. Amy asked him if they would ever have an intimate relationship. Sheldon sat down and told her before he met her; he wasn't interested in being intimate with anyone. Amy prompted him to see if he felt any differently now, and he admitted it was a possibility. This didn't really cheer her up, so he explained to her that although it didn't feel like it to her; to him it did feel really intimate, Amy knew this, but said she just wished she could have more. Sheldon managed to cheer her up, by pointing out that they had only known each other for three years and they were already in bed with each other (technically sitting on Sheldon's bed). Amy said they should go back to the others, but Sheldon stopped her, and very calmly pointed out that as they had had love spell put on their characters in the game, it would only be right to carry it on. And so alone in his room, away from all others, he allowed her to experience a form of virtual intimacy, using a dice to decide what to do next, upon getting a throw she didn't like he was willing to break the rules and throw again (which for him is quite impressive), the two were still playing a while later, and had apparently progressed a long way when Leonard and Penny went to check on them.
In "The Deception Verification", Amy and Sheldon conclude that Penny is cheating on Leonard, so Sheldon decides to rush into Penny's apartment and catch her with the other guy. Amy does not recommend this action. When he does, he finds Leonard secretly hiding out to be with Penny, making Sheldon mad at Leonard. When he also vents his anger on Penny, Amy defends her. Sheldon warns her that the girlfriend of my enemy's girlfriend is also my enemy, Amy pulls her offer of a ride and Sheldon claims that there must be a third option or exception for Amy. He needs the ride since he's mad at Leonard.
In "The Raiders Minimization", Sheldon offers Amy to lose her virginity; however it was for her first viewing of one of his favorite movies, "Raiders of the Lost Ark". She enjoys it, but points out that the plot would still work without the main character. Since she spoiled the movie for him, and later the whole group, he tries to find something to spoil that she likes. First he reads "Pride and Prejudice," declaring it a timeless masterpiece, and then he looks into the comics page. Finally, they start watching her childhood favorite show, "Little House on the Prairie" and he keeps pointing out inaccuracies. She quickly picks up on what he is doing and tells him that since they are in a relationship, he should tell her when he is angry with her. They both apologize, though he still tells her what is wrong with the comic strip Garfield, showing that they still take one step backwards.
In "The Workplace Proximity", Amy starts working on an experiment at Caltech which does not bother Sheldon at first. After Howard's comments how he would not want to work all day near Bernadette, Sheldon withdraws his approval though Amy still plans to work there. Embarrassing Amy in front of her co-workers at lunch with inappropriate ethnic comments and talking about the status of their relationship, Amy is extremely unhappy with him. Late at night he comes to her apartment to apologize. She calls her something of a weirdo. They do manage to say that they like each other quirks and all. Sheldon then ruins the moment by adding that she should like him since he doesn't see anyone else knocking at her door. Later Amy tells Penny and Bernadette that she is not apologizing to Sheldon.
In "The Romance Resonance", Sheldon makes a great scientific discovery of a new super-heavy element which thrills Sheldon until he realizes he made a bone-headed error in his calculations. Everyone still praises him, much to his annoyance. Amy first tries to soothe him like everyone else until she finally agrees with him taking his side in their relationship. Sheldon tells her that that is the most romantic thing he has ever heard which pleases Amy. Later when it looks like Sheldon is about to actually kiss Amy, Amy comes out of "the zone" and her wishful daydream.
In "The Thanksgiving Decoupling", when Sheldon doesn't want to go to Mrs. Wolowitz's for Thanksgiving, he starts to compare his life to that of a black man being taken from Africa and being sold as a slave in America. Amy tells him that he can't say that because it is inappropriate, he responds by saying "Yes, Miss Amy." When Amy hears that a drunken Sheldon has been mean to Howard she demands he apologize, he relents and says that he is sorry. Afterwards he looks at Amy and then says to everyone "Ain't she great?" Amy is flattered and smiles, Sheldon then abruptly says "Now, how's about you get us a couple of beers?" and follows by smacking her rear. Amy, shocked, starts to walk slowly toward the kitchen as a dazed smile slowly appears on her face. Amy looks back at Sheldon, who smiles back wholeheartedly.
Sheldon slapping Amy on the posterior.
In "The Cooper Extraction", Amy points out to the gang that most of them would not know each other if Sheldon had not been part of their lives. Amy envisions herself crying and alone on her birthday with a cupcake and a single candle. To cheer her up, Leonard shows her Sheldon's screen saver that includes a picture of her. After he returns, she is very happy to see him and asks about how he felt holding a baby. Sheldon felt the baby didn't understand him better than anybody else. Sheldon was in Texas helping his sister in the birth of his nephew, much to his disgust.
In "The Locomotive Manipulation", Amy arranges for a Valentine's Day weekend trip to a Napa Valley bed and breakfast inn for the two of them. They will travel on a vintage train and have a romantic dinner together. To make Sheldon more comfortable they are travelling by train, Howard and Bernadette will be with them and they will have separate rooms. After Sheldon tells her that she is manipulating him, Amy admits that she was only looking for some romance. Insulted, Sheldon tells her that he will give her romance. To fulfill his list of romantic things, he drinks his wine which burns, stares into her eyes momentarily until she blinks and loses and then kisses her. Though it was meant to be quick and sarcastic, Sheldon seems to enjoy it and lingers. He first leans over and then puts his arms around Amy. Amy is too shock to hug him back. Amy then tells him that it was nice. Sheldon wants to leave to again talk to the conductor. Amy still breathless from the kiss tells him to have a good time. Then Sheldon invites her to go with him.
Sheldon kisses Amy.
In "The Table Polarization", the gang wants to add a dining room table to Apartment 4A which as usual Sheldon-like since he doesn't want things changed. Sheldon objects to Penny changing Leonard to stand up against him. Penny points out that Amy has changed Sheldon who agrees and then decides to break up with Amy. Amy is alerted and deals with it by agreeing with Sheldon to break up and that Leonard is manipulating him to break up with her though she clearly knows him and is manipulating him. She goes with him supporting his fight against that awful table and is feeding him his lines. He stops when she includes that he is moving in with his girlfriend.
In "The Indecision Amalgamation", Sheldon is obsessed with his video game system decision and rambles on about his option while having their date night dinner at Amy's apartment. She fakes an interest in his problem after Sheldon thinks she isn't paying him enough attention. Finally she screams at him, "Please pass the butter!" after he constantly ignores his request. Still mulling over his decision at Best Buy, Amy almost falls asleep on his shoulder.
In "The Anything Can Happen Thursday Recurrence", Penny takes Sheldon to a psychic at a time when he can't decide what new problem of science to follow after string theory is disproven. The psychic knows that he has trouble with his girl and that following that relationship will give him the answers he seeks. Amy lies to him about being sick when she goes out to dinner with Bernadette who are both tired of his complaining about string theory. She makes it up to him like Bernadette does to Howard by showing up in a Catholic girl's school uniform. He is not impressed unless she has a Blu-ray DVD of the film "Gravity".
In "The Status Quo Combustion", Sheldon is disturbed by the university telling him he can't change his field of study, Leonard's comment that he doesn't want Sheldon to live with him and Penny and the comic book store fire. Amy tells him that living alone might be good for him and if that doesn't work, he could move in with her. Pushing him even further, Sheldon decides to leave town to think things over without telling Amy. When talking over his problems with Stuart, he admits that Amy loves him. The next day, he calls Amy and she thinks he sounds like he's doing fine. Penny and Leonard assure him that it's for the best, and then Amy starts hitting Leonard with a pillow telling him that he should not have let Sheldon go.
In "The Locomotion Interruption", Sheldon has traveled around the USA for 45 days winding up in Kingman, Arizona after all his possessions and his pants had been stolen. He calls Leonard to come and get him. Amy comes along very upset about having not been called by Sheldon and about him never having told her goodbye before he left. Sheldon did not want Amy to know that he had failed in his journey and that she would think less of him which touched Amy. She told him that she is OK with her that he was not perfect. Still unhappy about his unsuccessful trip, Amy told him to consider that it was an adventure which Sheldon accepts. He now feels confident to take on any changes in his life until he finds out that Penny cut her hair.
In "The First Pitch Insufficiency", Shamy and Lenny go on a double-date where Sheldon is bragging about their relationship is so much better than theirs. Shamy has an 8.2 out of ten for relationship stability based upon well proven criteria. He also compares their Relationship Agreement to the thirteen colonies and the US Constitution. Amy is really enjoying Sheldon's comments about how great their relationship is to the point that if she was wearing flag underwear that it would be on fire. Leonard looks over the test; however, Penny doesn't want to take it. She already has his doubt and doesn't need them confirmed. They are engaged and still have very little in common which scares her. It also scares Leonard, but he still want to face all their problems together. His reassure really touches Penny and Amy who would like Sheldon to say things like that. Sheldon says not worry about it. They have an 8.2 which guarantees that she is happy.
In "The Prom Equivalency", Sheldon is worried after hearing from both Penny and Leonard that the tradition after prom is to have sex with your date. After seeing Amy in her prom dress, Sheldon runs off, distressed. Later, Amy comes into Sheldon's room and Sheldon tells Amy about his concerns. Amy gets up to leave saying she doesn't want to miss yet another prom, and Sheldon stops her telling her that he really did think she looked pretty. Amy tells Sheldon that it is okay and he didn't have to spend the night with her unless he wanted to and that she just wanted to have a nice time at the prom. She goes on to say that she wants to tell him something and that it was okay if Sheldon didn't feel the same way. Sheldon responds by saying, "I love you too," shocking Amy. Sheldon further confesses his love saying that there is no other way to describe his feelings for her though he briefly considered it was a brain parasite. The episode ends with the happy couple taking a picture at the prom photo booth together.
Sheldon tells Amy that he loves her.
In "The Clean Room Infiltration", Amy insists that Sheldon come to the Christmas Eve dinner party she is having despite his dislike for the Christmas season. She also kissed him under the mistletoe when they were Christmas tree shopping. Sheldon plots revenge against her to make her feel as miserable as he does and hopefully she will never make him celebrate Christmas again. Since they agreed to not exchange gifts, he felt that if he got her the perfect gift, it would make her miserable. He gets his picture taken with Santa and has it enclosed in a picture frame which includes a tender recorded Christmas greeting to Amy. Amy loves it and gives him a gift of some Christmas cookies that his Meemaw used to make. Sheldon is touched and wonders if Christmas isn't about giving until Raj reaches for one of his cookies. Sheldon admits to Bernadette that he loves Amy and Amy admits her love in front to the entire group.
In "The Comic Book Store Regeneration", Sheldon is mad at Amy for working with Barry Kripke in string theory. Sheldon deflects his anger by telling Penny and Leonard that Amy was doing experiments on them by giving them puzzles to do and comparing their results to her chimps and making them made at Amy.
In "The Colonization Application", Sheldon and Amy decide to take their relationship to the next, to buy a pet together - a turtle. While picking one out Sheldon reveals that he has put in an application to be on of the first colonists on Mars. Amy is hurt that she didn't consult first with her since she thought they were planning their future together on the same planet. Sheldon then asks Amy to join him on his journey to Mars. They start thinking about raising a family and that their kids will be martians. Sheldon likes that idea about having kids with neat martian names.
In "The Skywalker Incursion", Amy obtains Howard's TARDIS at Bernadette's insistence and mounts it's door on her bedroom hoping to tempt Sheldon into her bed. They do play Doctor Who, but Sheldon runs in dressed as the Doctor and forgets something and runs back out. Amy tells herself that she should have thought this out better.
In "The Commitment Determination", Sheldon and Amy are making out on the couch in the their fifth anniversary while Sheldon also asks Amy about the new Flash TV show. Amy stops him thinking that he should be concentrating more on her. Sheldon thinks he is since he truly wants to know her opinion about the show. For a couple of days, he doesn't hear from Amy. Calling her, Amy is totally exhausted physically and emotionally from being his girlfriend, so she wants to take a break and think about their relationship. Sheldon reluctantly agrees and doesn't know what to do with the engagement ring he bought her. Was he planning on proposing? Did Amy screw up a marriage proposal?
Amy taking a break from their relationship.
Family
Sheldon is very different from the rest of his family. His mother Mary Cooper is a devout Christian and a loving parent, and is one of the few people who refer to him as "Shelly". Leonard Hofstadter called her Sheldon's "Kryptonite" and will often call her when Sheldon is having serious issues. In "The Mommy Observation", Sheldon surprises her mother with a visit and caught her have sexual relations with her boyfriend. First Sheldon condemns her for her coitus despite her Christian beliefs and she sends him to his room. Howard, who was in Houston lecturing at NASA, tells him how he drove away his mother's boyfriend and how she has been lonely ever since. Sheldon decides to not stand in his mother's way of happiness though he still chooses to condemn her internally. Also he tries to initiate a talk with her about the birds and the bees.
Sheldon also has a fraternal twin sister, Missy Cooper, a hostess at Fuddruckers. Tall and attractive, she caught the attention of Leonard, as well as of Raj and Howard. Sheldon believes that within Missy's eggs lays the potential for another "superior mutation" like himself, and on this grounds considered his friends unsuitable to be with his sister. Sheldon became offended when he found that Missy tells others he is a rocket scientist; he apparently thinks the title is inaccurate and below him, telling her she might as well say he is a toll collector at the Golden Gate Bridge.
Along with Missy, Sheldon also has an older brother, named George Cooper Jr. who often beat him up, along with Missy. Mary described the two of them as being "dumb as soup." George Jr. has never been shown on the show.
Sheldon's father, George, an almost-redneck Texan Homer Simpson, died shortly before the series began, and Missy visited Sheldon to bring paperwork regarding their father's estate. Sheldon recalls that his father would force him to watch football ever since he was four despite his lack of interest for the sport. He also taught him archery which gives Sheldon an odd smell of K-mart bourbon whenever he plays it, including the Wii version.
Sheldon is also very close to his maternal grandmother, whom he calls "Meemaw," who in turn calls him "Moon Pie". Her name is not yet revealed.
Sheldon also cherishes the memory of his Pop-Pop, Meemaw's husband, who was his only relative that urged him to follow his dream into science. His grandfather passed away before Christmas when Sheldon was five, which greatly traumatized him. When his Christmas wish to Santa to bring back Pop-Pop didn't come true, it soured him so much he hated the holiday altogether.
Sheldon has a maternal uncle, Edward, who is called "Stumpy" as the result of a time when he cleaned a wood chipper by hand. Sheldon had another uncle, called Carl Cooper, who was killed by a badger while cleaning a chimney. And another uncle that may have done things to children that were legal in Oklahoma per "The Clean Room Infiltration".
Relatives
- Father: George Cooper Sr.
- Mother: Mary Cooper
- Brother: George Cooper Jr.
- Twin Sister: Missy Cooper
- Grandmother: Meemaw
- Grandfather: Pop-Pop
- Uncles: Uncle Carl, Uncle Edward; There is another uncle who gave children gifts like Santa and was not arrested in Oklahoma for his actions.
- Brother-in-law (via Missy): Unnamed
- Nephew (via Missy): Unnamed
Eating habits
Consistent with his characterization, Sheldon has many detailed and routine eating habits. His gifted memory allows him to remember that he stopped breast feeding on a drizzly Tuesday (S2E01). He loves to eat at Bob's Big Boy, an American restaurant chain, but eats at the Cheesecake Factory on Tuesday nights (presumably before the occasional Klingon Boggle, which replaced eating at Big Boy (which then moved to Thursday until they had pizza on that day. Now Sheldon most likely eats at Big Boy whenever or on special occasions.)
- Breakfast: Sheldon always eats oatmeal for breakfast on Mondays, and always has French Toast for breakfast on certain days.
- Burgers: Sheldon prefers burgers at Big Boy [S01E05] but later changed to the ones at the Cheesecake Factory. He prefers his burgers cooked medium-well, with dill slices not sweet, individual relish packets, and served with onion rings with extra breading. When ordering Cheesecake Factory burgers, he gets the barbecue bacon cheeseburger with barbecue sauce, bacon, and cheese on the side [S02E07].
- Cereal: Sheldon sorts his cereal numerically by fiber content, and rewards himself with "Honey Puffs" cereal [S01E02]. Cereal is eaten with 1/4 cup of 2% milk while watching Dr. Who on BBC America on Saturday mornings [S01E07]
- Chinese: Usually eaten on Friday nights [S02E02]. He prefers his chicken diced, not shredded with low sodium soy sauce and spicy hot mustard, also brown rice instead of white [S02E04]. Sheldon is adamant that the number of dumplings can be evenly split between all partakers of the meal, and always wants it from the restaurant Szechuan Palace. Sheldon even tries to learn Mandarin to confront the restaurant when he believes they have been passing off orange chicken as tangerine chicken.
- Cookies: oreos are to be eaten with a glass of cold milk [S02E08]
- Desserts: per his mother, Sheldon's favorite dessert is cobbler [S01E04]
- Drinks: Sheldon neither drinks coffee, nor alcohol, because he promised his mother that he wouldn't start doing drugs while he resided in California. Instead he likes drinking Diet CokeĀ®. When forced to order a cocktail, Sheldon solves the problem by ordering a "virgin Cuba Libre," which is nothing more than a CokeĀ® in a tall glass, served with a lime wedge. He then goes on to ask if Penny would make it diet. Sheldon drinks herbal tea, sometimes with honey. His favorite flavor appears to be chamomile. Sheldon drinks hot chocolate only in the months containing the letter "R" (January, February, March, April, September, October, November, December) explaining "What is life without whimsy!" Sheldon has also been seen drinking:
- āorange soda [pilot episode]
- faux Monster energy drink [S01E03]
- apple juice [S01E06]
- faux Diet Coke [S01E08]
- faux Aquafina water [S01E09]
- faux V-8 juice [S01E12]
- warm milk when he can't sleep [S02E01]
- faux 7-Up [S02E02]
- faux Diet Sprite [S02E03]
- cold milk with cookies and faux Dasani bottled water [S02E08]
- Grilled Cheese: demanded by Sheldon when he had a cold; although he pointed out that his mother always made him split pea soup with hot dogs cut up in it and homemade croutons [S01E11].
- Movie Food: Popcorn, Red Vines, Slushie, Sheldon doesn't like to go to the cinema if he can't eat Red Vines or drink Icees during the movie, and only if someone comes with him, so that he/she can give him the Heimlich Maneuver in case he chokes on popcorn. On the matter of Icees vs. Slurpees], Sheldon maintains that the two are completely different.
- Oatmeal: eaten for breakfast on Mondays [S03E03]
- Pizza: Sheldon eats Giacomo's pizza on Thursday with sausage, mushrooms, and light olives [S02E06]. In The Agreement Dissection, however, Sheldon mentions that they used to order from a restaurant called Franconi's, which went out of business, forcing them to switch to Graziano's.
- Popcorn: all movie visits must include popcorn, which is why one should not go to the movies alone due to risk of choking [S02E02]
- Pudding: Sheldon prefers chocolate over tapioca.[S02E13]
- Thai food: eaten on Mondays - Mee Krob with extra peanuts.
Sheldon does not believe that three-tined forks are, in actuality, forks, but tridents, and refuses to eat with them. Sheldon dislikes haggis and blood pudding. Sheldon is in the habit of reminding people that chili by definition does not have beans in it. Like Leonard, Sheldon hates Greek food, saying a lamb kebab is "little cubes of charred meat that tastes like sweat".
Routines
Sheldon has many routines which he follows strictly. His Saturday morning routine is to wake up at 6:15, he pours himself a bowl of cereal, adds a 1/4 cup of 2% milk, sits down in his spot on the couch and turns on BBC America and watches Doctor Who. If he cannot complete this routine for some reason, he becomes very distraught. In addition, Sheldon goes to the Comic Book Store every Wednesday so he can see all the new comics on New Comic Book Day. Also, every Wednesday night is "Halo Night", and Sheldon makes a big fuss about not starting at exactly 8:00 p.m. and he must have the exact amount of time to play the game or else he takes the time out of eating or bathroom time. Sheldon does his laundry every Saturday night at 8.15 p.m. and uses a FlipFold to fold his t-shirts and socks. Each day, Sheldon has a specific pajama to wear. In the case of a stain, he still would not swap a pajama. He would rather sleep without bottoms as seen in "The Barbarian Sublimation", when he spilled grape juice on his bottoms. Sheldon hates it when people change the contrast of the TV settings, talk to him through the bathroom door, change Band-Aids in front of him, buy generic ketchup, forget to rinse the sink, adjust the thermostat, or cook with Cilantro and mock trains. It is revealed in "The Staircase Implementation" that when there is an emergency in the apartment Sheldon turns the apartment's flag upside down to indicate this.
Technology preferences
Being a scientific genius, Sheldon is very particular about his technological devices. Early on in the series, he uses what seems to be a customized Dell XPS M1710. After being robbed, he adopts an Alienware M17x Nebula Red laptop that runs Windows 7, which he doesn't like as it is more user-friendly than Windows Vista. Sheldon's favorite Linux-based operating system is Ubuntu. Sheldon has an iPhone 4 and he and his friends enjoy making fun of the Apple Genius Bar employees. He is also shown to use a Macbook Pro, with a red case, when video chatting with Amy Farrah Fowler.
Video games
Sheldon and his friends play many video games, such as Age of Conan where he is a conqueror by the name of "Sheldor the Conqueror" and has reached level 80. Sheldon and all of his friends play numerous multiplayer online games; he is a Blood Elf Warlock (though it is originally stated he is a Night Elf Rogue) in World of Warcraft, loves Super Mario Bros (wanting to control people in the same way he can control Mario in the video game Super Mario 64), and plays Halo every Wednesday night with his friends. He also plays bass guitar in the video game Rock Band. When Sheldon plays Wii Sports Archery, he likes to draw an imaginary arrow out of an imaginary quiver, because he believes "the people at Nintendo can only go so far in helping us recreate an actual athletic experience. We have to do our part, too." Sheldon is not good at Wii Mario Kart. Raj points out that, in real-life or in games, he cannot drive. However, Sheldon is very good at Wii Sports bowling (and bowling in real-life). Sheldon also likes to play the vintage text adventure game Zork.
Trivia
- In "The Russian Rocket Reaction", Sheldon reveals he was 9 years old when he started his all-time enemies list on a 1989 floppy disk. His age is further constrained by the following consideration: Sheldon is a Taurus, according to "The Peanut Reaction", placing his birth date between April 19th and May 20th of 1980. This age is supported by Leonard's comment that Sheldon has been emotionally stuck for about 29 years in "The Einstein Approximation", with an air date of February 2010. However, a family chart in "The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification" shows that he is 29 at the time of the episode, which aired in September 2010. Further, in "The Friendship Contraction", premiering in February 2012, Leonard described Sheldon as a "30-year-old man who can't survive on his own". (Though, it is possible Leonard was just being imprecise.) These latter two statements indicate a birth date between April 20th and May 21st of 1981 in the span of the Taurus. [Note that inconsistencies arise only if one assumes a temporal correspondence between the airdate of the referenced episode and the events featured in that episode. Therefore, Sheldon should be considered to have been born between April 19th – May 20th, 1980.]
- Sheldon is 6 ft 1 in (1.86 m) tall [1] – the height of Jim Parsons. (Parsons claims to measure 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m), presumably with shoes, and the Sheldon life-size standup poster is 74 inches in height.)
- He weighs either 165 lbs (75 kg), as revealed in "The Porkchop Indeterminacy", or 140 lbs (63.5 kg), as estimated in "The Luminous Fish Effect". However, those are most likely inaccurate now, due to the amount of time that's passed.
- He has been described as a "tall, thin... praying mantis" by both Penny and Amy Farrah Fowler.
- According to his mother, Mary Cooper, Sheldon has her eyes, his daddy's temper, and "all that science stuff" comes from Jesus.
- Several ways to annoy Sheldon are laid out in "The Bad Fish Paradigm" (S02E01), including:
- Change the brightness/contrast settings of the television.
- Take a band-aid off in front of him.
- Buy generic ketchup.
- Forget to rinse the sink.
- Talk to him through the bathroom door.
- Adjust the thermostat.
- Cook with cilantro leaves
- Pronounce the 't' in 'often'
- Make fun of trains
- According to Sheldon, he says that his mom wants grandchildren through him, but Penny adds that she wouldn't want a test tube grandson born out of wedlock (this being against Mrs. Cooper's born-again religious beliefs).
- Mary's water broke for Sheldon and Missy in a K-mart.
- Sheldon kept track of his bowel movements in a notebook ever since he was 2, even down to color, shape and consistency. His first entry was "This is so embarrassing. What was wrong with diapers?"
- Sheldon is not a sporty person, but is very gifted at bowling and can consistently get strikes. ("The Wheaton Recurrence")
- Sheldon was raised in a Christian household in Galveston, East Texas, Texas, USA (Texas just happens to be the same state that Jim Parsons was actually born in), although he once said his mom had to help his dad during tornado season, as the aluminum house he had slipped off its cinder blocks. (This could have been his father's way of a tornado shelter or his parents divorced by then and he moved into an aluminum trailer. The reason for these explanations being as we saw Sheldon's childhood home in the season 3 premier, where his mother still lives.)
- Sheldon has perfected "glow-in-the-dark fish"
- Sheldon has 212 friends on MySpace.
- Sheldon is allergic to bees and cats and gets asthma when he is around them (despite having a pet cat as a child and a whole glaring of cats when he missed Amy.)
- Sheldon considers himself to be the first "Homo novus" - a new, evolved species of Homo Sapiens.
- Sheldon doesn't believe in luck or coincidence, instead citing the Law of Large Numbers (LLN) in statistics as the explanation for such phenomena.
- Sheldon was humiliated on national radio during NPR's Science Friday with Ira Flatow when his voice became extremely high pitched due to Helium seeping into his office as part of a prank by Barry Kripke.
- Sheldon agrees with the theory that 75-80% of any Rock-Paper-Scissors games you play with a person you are familiar with end up in a tie due to the limited number of outcomes, and accordingly he prefers the variation Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock.
- Sheldon used a Doppler Effect costume for Halloween.
- Sheldon uses his Green Lantern action figure as a safe place for his emergency money.
- Sheldon is fluent in Morse code.
- Sheldon believes that chocolate is the best flavor of pudding.
- Sheldon's favorite amino acid is Lysine, which is a major plot point to control the dinosaurs in the novel/movie Jurassic Park
- Sheldon thinks that his very strong attention to hygiene and his skill in writing Java Applets are the main reasons why his friends like him.
- Sheldon loves trains and monkeys.
- Sheldon fears dogs and formerly, birds.
- Sheldon had a cat named Lucky when he was a child, and this cat died because it was hit by a car. According to Leonard, this is another example of Sheldon's inability to understand irony.
- Sheldon thought about creating a griffin after Lucky was killed, but his parents didn't want to secure the appropriate eagle eggs and lion semen.
- Sheldon learned how to swim (on the floor) online.
- Sheldon cannot stand whistling.
- Sheldon was very busy in his teenage years examining the range of diffusion in the super-symmetric theories, which brought him to re-examine the ultraviolet properties of supergravity a loop.
- Sheldon's expenses account for 46.9% of his after-tax income.
- Sheldon imposes and teaches behavior lessons to any friend of his who disappoints him for three consecutive times.
- Sheldon thrives off his work, and if left jobless he loses all focus and moves onto a new experiment/obsession every day, much to Leonard's dismay.
- Sheldon does not like teddy bears because he thinks bears are terrifying.
- Sheldon was called by Leonard "one lab accident away from becoming a super villain".
- According to Leonard, Sheldon loves having his brain scanned.
- Sheldon only shows genuine affection for one person, his grandmother (or Meemaw), whom he writes to.
- Sheldon is a Taurus, placing his birthday between April 21 and May 20.
- Sheldon, though unwilling to fight, is physically the strongest of the group, easily holding his own against Raj in an arm wrestle, and once referred to Leonard and Howard as 'tiny tiny men'. He was also able to move his entire dresser, with reasonable ease when barricading his door, due to paranoia, after being burgled.
- Sheldon owns a pocket watch. He bought it for himself when he was shopping for Amy to get her back in The Shiny Trinket Maneuver. It is seen again in The Locomotive Manipulation.
- Sheldon's little toes and lateral incisors are degenerated, which he says is due to his high level of evolution which keeps him from using a motor vehicle correctly.
- Sheldon once took a bet with Howard about a species of cricket, but lost and had to give Howard his Flash comic book.
- Sheldon went to a sci-fi convention on a bus for 10 hours and violated his personal rule of not urinating on buses twice to see Wil Wheaton, who didn't show up at the convention, which was revealed in season 5 that it was because Wheaton thought it be cooler to play on Hollywood Squares. This and the events of the card tournament and bowling alley, led Sheldon to consider Wheaton his arch nemesis. He has made three websites dedicated to hating him: Willwheatonstinks.net, org and .com. It is unknown if Sheldon still has these websites after making up with Will Wheaton.
- Sheldon has actually been kind to Penny; in two episodes he actually drove her to the hospital because she dislocated her shoulder after she slipped and fell in the shower, and loaned her a significant amount of money to help her in a financial pinch. The latter favor led Penny to think everyone was grilling her on her financial situation, even when they weren't.
- Sheldon was once offered a position at a secret military base, but was later forced to deny the position due to his inability to keep secrets.
- Sheldon thought that the trip he and his friends took to the North Pole in Season 2/3 was "a hoot and a half."
- It was mentioned that Sheldon and Leonard once had (before they were robbed) "A TV, 2 laptops, 4 external hard drives, a PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox 360, a classic Nintendo, a Super Nintendo, a Nintendo 64, a Nintendo Wii, Halo 1-3, Call of Duty 1-3, Rock Band 1-2, Final Fantasy 1-9, Legend of Zelda, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Galaxy, Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympics, and Ms. Pac-Man. They also own Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption by Rockstar Games. They then probably got all the games and consoles again with a new T.V. and new computers. Sheldon's data was safe as well, as he was performing a backup in the previous episode. His new computer came with Windows 7 which he doesn't like because it's much more user friendly than Windows Vista.
- Sheldon has adhesive whimsical duck stickers, holding umbrellas in his bathtub to prevent slipping.
- Sheldon keeps a daily log of social interactions called Sheldon's Log (in place of Captain's Log).
- Sheldon doesn't trust banks because he believes that ATM machines will lead the charge of the robot armies when they revolt against humans.
- Sheldon keeps Band-Aids with him at all times, as well as in his kitchen, top desk drawer, etc.
- As of "The Excelsior Acquisition" (S3E16), Sheldon has a restraining order from Stan Lee as well as Leonard Nimoy. In "The Vacation Solution" (S5E16), he also mentions having one from the late Carl Sagan. In "The Proton Displacement" (S7E07), he gets a new one from Bill Nye the Science Guy.
- Sheldon doesn't seem to understand the concept of racism. This is implied in The Egg Salad Equivalency when he calls Mrs. Davis a slave to her sexual desires, even though she is black. In The Tenure Turbulence, he also gives her the HBO series Roots, which is about the slave trade in America.
- Sheldon has an in depth knowledge of American Football, only because he was raised in Texas and his father would force him to watch it from the time he was four until he went off to college ā the longest seven years of Sheldon's life.
- Sheldon rarely laughs, but when he does, it is a quick internal breath while showing a small smile. One of the rare times we hear him laugh properly is in season 5's "The Vacation Solution" over a physics Mad Lib. Another time, he has laughed like that is when Leonard made a multiplication error that was published.
- Sheldon has never worn a shirt with words, unless a shirt logo has words on it, like in episode 5 of season 4, and always wears a long sleeved shirt under a t-shirt.
- Sheldon got drunk three times during the series: at the end of "The Grasshopper Experiment", "The Pants Alternative" and The Stag Convergence. In the last two, he showed a sense of humor and irony above what he normally has.
- Sheldon apparently believes in the possibility of time travel to the past according to the beginning of "The Luminous Fish Effect", explanations of time paradoxes in "The Nerdvana Annihilation" and a point of the room-mate agreement in "The Staircase Implementation".
- When somebody is distressed, Sheldon consoles them by saying "There, there", the only proof of his compassion towards other fellow human beings.
- Sheldon doesn't seem to like internet memes, considering them "venality". He once gave Penny a "strike" (out of three and you're out) for sending him a picture of a cat who wants to "Haz cheezburger". He also put Leonard's e-mails in his spam folder over Leonard sending him a video of The Keyboard Cat.
- Sheldon is scared of waking Penny before 11 A.M., because she has an "I'll punch you in the throat" rule if he does.
- Sheldon is skilled in weaving as he is seen weaving ponchos in his apartment.
- If nothing is approved by Sheldon, he will not go through with it. (This is seen when Leonard, Raj, Howard, and Sheldon are trying to figure out the best way to see a movie. With Sheldon not approving any ideas, the others leave him. He responds: "They're right. It was the only option.")
- "Prevening" - Sheldon's made up word for the hours too late for afternoon, but too early for evening.
- Leonard had to surpass three barriers set by Sheldon in order to live with him.
- Sheldon prefers the word "Hokum" over Bogus, Hocus Pocus, Mumbo Jumbo and Hokie Pokie.
- He considered Amy Farrah Fowler a friend, who is a girl, but not his girlfriend. This statement, however, is moot since "The Flaming Spittoon Acquisition" when the two officially become a couple.
- He missed getting Stan Lee to autograph his comic since he had to go to traffic court to pay a fine, but ended up in jail after he insulted the judge and refused to apologize. He then went to his house with Penny and ended up with a restraining order against him.
- Sheldon had built a robot called Shelbot, but was eventually discarded since Penny and Leonard were quite annoyed at Sheldon's idea for doing so.
- Sheldon owns a Flash costume which he, so far, has worn on three occasions: in "The Middle Earth Paradigm" before Penny's Halloween party before switching to a Doppler Effect patterned suit, in "The Work Song Nanocluster" when high on caffeine and in "The Justice League Recombination" when attending a New Year's Eve costume party.
- Prior to Sheldon's date with Amy in "The Robotic Manipulation", the closest he had ever come to one was "a semi-incestuous Teens for Jesus Fourth of July Hoedown" at which he square-danced with his twin sister, Missy.
- Sheldon once attempted to declare his and Leonard's apartment a sovereign state and even made some currency for it. This was around the time Sheldon got fired from the university and he kept changing obsessions.
- Sheldon hates dirty socks. This is demonstrated by the time that Leonard, Raj, and Howard signed Sheldon up on a dating site and the site found Sheldon's perfect match, but Sheldon refused to go until Raj told him that he put a dirty sock in his apartment and would not remove it unless Sheldon went on the date.
- According to Sheldon in a deleted scene/blooper in "The Maternal Capacitance" the last time his mother visited, she tried to trick him into getting re-baptized below the Santa Monica Pier.
- Sheldon went to Johnson Elementary School until he went to college at age 11. It was there he earned the nickname, "Smelly Pooper" with kids going around saying, "Shelly Cooper is a Smelly Pooper". Amy believes this is gold for gossip.
- When Sheldon was under the influence of Howard's mom's Valium, he revealed that his mother used to smoke in the car. While "Jesus said it was OK", they couldn't tell their dad, George.
- Due to his good archery skills (taught to him by his father, George), Sheldon believes he would have made a great elf.
- There are two pieces of tape on the floor in Leonard and Sheldon's bathroom. One is in front of the sink and people must brush and floss their teeth from behind this piece of tape. A second piece is in front of the toilet "for those that stand up to pee", though what exactly it marks was not specified. If someone gets the mirror or floor dirty, before Sheldon's inspection, they can lose their T.V. privileges.
- As part of the roommate agreement created by Sheldon, Leonard has to wash his feet in a special tub before he gets in the bath or shower.
- The tentative title for his future autobiography is You're Welcome, Mankind.
- He had a Somalian pen pal who was kidnapped by pirates.
- Sheldon has to be knocked out by an anesthetic when he goes for a cleaning at the dentist, as he bites.
- In 1998, Sheldon bought a Tamagotchi and it is still alive.
- Both Howard and Sheldon first connect with their girlfriends over the personalities of their mothers.
- Considering his high intellect, lack of knowledge of social regulations, and habitual and obsessive personality, it is possible Sheldon has Asperger's Syndrome or some other condition in the Autism spectrum.
- In kindergarten, Sheldon recited Pi to a thousand places for the school talent show.
- In "The Bakersfield Expedition", Sheldon dressed as the Star Trek: The Next Generation character, Lt. Data.
- He might have aquaphobia (fear of water) per the episode "The Friendship Algorithm".
- Sheldon sometimes reverts to his Texan upbringing and uses expressions and ideas from his mother and father that are not as acceptable in the 21st century. (Women are like an egg salad sandwich...), (Swatting Amy on the behind and calling her a great gal.)
- As a child, Sheldon was not allowed to do his homework until after he watched football with his father.
- Sheldon can speak Hawaiian.
- Its implied that Sheldon admires Madam Curie, as he put her in the collage for his screensaver along with Stephen Hawking and Amy.
- Sheldon meets James Earl Jones who likes Sheldon and he takes him out on a night on the town instead of having a restraining order issued against him as Leonard Nimoy, Carl Sagan, Stan Lee, and Bill Nye have done.
- In 2012, scientists at CERN actually DID find a new particle, and after additional research, confirmed that, in fact, the Higgs boson has been found such as Sheldon had been working on.
- Sheldon's abstinence from alcohol may have been an afterthought by the writers early on. In the pilot episode, when Leonard introduces Penny to the gang, he is seen drinking a beverage in a brown bottle with his dinner, which is presumably a beer.
- Another bad habit of Sheldon's is that he reveals himself bad events that he could have gotten away with, such as cleaning Penny's apartment at night, which Penny figured out that it was Sheldon by leaving a list for her closet, and a video message for Kripke after pranking him and inadvertently the University president and board of directors, something he could have easily gotten away with.
- Liev Schreiber - Prototype Sheldon? = He plays a scientist which has few people skills and is working on a weather model that leads him to find holes in time. Physics, time travel, alternate realities, all things that Sheldon is interested in. He looks like he could be Sheldon's brother and often had that squinty eye look while trying to figure out something or when his friends confused him.
- The life-model for Sheldon may have been found in the person of physics wunderkind Taylor Wilson, whose life and achievements are remarkably similar, right down to coming from much the same region of the USA to the little matter of illegally stored yellowcake uranium used to fuel the working nuclear reactor in the garage - which Taylor built at age fourteen...
- Sheldon's sexuality remains largely a mystery for the first three seasons. It was presumed by most that Sheldon was asexual, which is a lack of sexual attraction to anyone. This is shown when Penny asks what Sheldon's "deal" is, (girls, guys, sock puppets?) In which Leonard responds that they have been operating under the assumption he has no "deal." When Penny insists everyone has a deal, Howard responds "not Sheldon." However, as his relationship with Amy Farrah Fowler develops it appears that Sheldon is perhaps demisexual, which is a largely unrecognized and rare sexual orientation, which is characterized by a lack of sexual attraction towards any person unless they become deeply emotionally or romantically connected with a specific person (Amy). Sheldon appears to feel at least a small amount of sexual attraction towards Amy (most notably in The Locomotive Manipulation, season 7, episode 15)
- Sheldon is very fond of cats, having owned one as a child and having adopted several when his relationship with Amy temporarily ended. Although Sheldon has issues touching most people, places, things, and animals Sheldon appears to have no issues with touching cats, despite being allergic to them.
- Sheldon's IQ of 187 points places him in a very small fraction of a percent of the most intelligent people in the world. An IQ score is a normalized, scaled representation of the percentage of people that are at least as "intelligent" (as measured by the test) as the scored person. Current IQ tests are scaled to 15 points per one standard deviation (all IQ tests have 100 assigned to the population mean score), older tests (e.g. the popular Stanford-Binet Test) have 16 points per st. deviation. Assuming Sheldon's score is on a modern test, an IQ of 187 means a person with such an intelligence level occurs approximately once per 300 million individuals, i.e. Sheldon is in the top 25 smartest individuals on the planet (using 7.25 billion as the human population of the Earth). If his score were on a SD-16 test instead, he'd have a 1 in 37 million intelligence, and there would therefore be some 200 individuals as smart as or smarter than him in the world.
- However, it is true that all IQ tests are highly imprecise for extreme values such as Sheldon's (owing to the very small number of people who can achieve such a result, rather than because of bad test design).
- An SD-15 test would assign an IQ of 195 to the smartest individual (i.e., the one with the best result) on the planet (and 194 to the next smartest); an SD-16 test would assign 201 or 202 to the smartest individual.
- Leonard and Sheldon are similar from The Odd Couple. Sheldon is similar to Felix: both are neat freaks and never let things go; difference is that Sheldon is incredibly arrogant and selfish sometimes than Felix.
- Sheldon bought an engagement ring that he keeps in his drawer.
- Fun fact: there is a Cooper City in Texas, near Dallas/Fort Worth.
Liev Schreiber from Kate and Leopold
Gallery
| An image gallery is available for Sheldon |
![The many faces of Sheldon.]()
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![Sheldon taking credit for the prank against Kripke.]()
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![Sheldon after a haircut from Penny.]()
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![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon and Zazzles.]()
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![Wheatonnnnnn!]()
![Leonard pranks Sheldon.]()
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![Sheldon and Love-Dovey.]()
![Sheldon as Gollum.]()
![Sheldon at his computer.]()
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![Sheldon.]()
![Goooood Loooord!]()
![Sheldon realizing Amy's attempts to make him happy are working.]()
![Sheldon working in "his spot".]()
![Morlocks attacking Sheldon.]()
![Boo!]()
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![Looking forward to a night alone, before he finds himself locked out.]()
![Sheldon reacting to Howard blowing his car horn.]()
![Sheldon presents Leonard his apartment flag.]()
![Sheldon's evil stare.]()
![Sheldon at Howard's bachelor party.]()
![Sheldon with the stolen address number from their building.]()
![Morlocks! Flesh eating Morlocks!]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Where are my pants?]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon trying to move Howard's car parked in "his" space.]()
![Sheldon.]()
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![Sheldon.]()
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![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon scared of the chair.]()
![Playing Ka'a while in isolation.]()
![Don't ask!!!]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon winks at Raj.]()
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![Sheldon hiding from Amy.]()
![Sheldon taking credit for the prank against Kripke.]()
![Sheldon has bongos!]()
![Cleaning out the drudgery lint catcher.]()
![Sheldon talks to Spock.]()
![Delivering Howard's bachelor party toast.]()
![Sheldon giving Howard a raspberry.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Disaster drill.]()
![Sheldon working with Amy.]()
![Sheldon and his disaster kit during the blackout.]()
![Making Cylon toast.]()
![Sheldon introducing "Fun with Flags".]()
![Sheldon trying to play basketball.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Penny's messy apartment.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Angry Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon's boring lecture.]()
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![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon calming down.]()
![Bazinga.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon getting his tux.]()
![Sheldon tries to make his acceptance speech as the guests celebrate the New Year.]()
![Sheldon's head stuck in hole.]()
![Sheldon apologizing to Amy.]()
![Sheldon.]()
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![Sheldon and air conditioner duct.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon and his Cooper Coupons.]()
![Sheldon talking to toy Spock during his nightmare.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![A drunken Sheldon tries to play keyboard.]()
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![Sheldon's Star Trek nightmare.]()
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![Sheldon and his bongos.]()
![Sheldon eating spaghetti and meatballs at Amy's.]()
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![Apartment 4A flag.]()
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![Sheldon is angry and looks like the emperor in Star Wars.]()
![Sheldon inventing three person chess.]()
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![Sheldon and his cats.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon at work.]()
![Sheldon in his office.]()
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![Sheldon and toy Spock.]()
![Tipsy Sheldon telling jokes.]()
![Redesigning Leonard's application]()
![Sheldon as Data.]()
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![Sheldon taking over the parking spot that he thinks should be his.]()
![Penny. Penny. Penny.]()
![Nebraska edition of "Fun with Flags".]()
![I hate this planet. Sheldon as Data.]()
![Sheldon denoting Team Leonard.]()
![Sheldon's Star Trek nightmare.]()
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![Sheldon discovers that he likes his spot.]()
![Packing up Leonard's stuff.]()
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![Sheldon.]()
![Sheldon invented a game.]()
![Using the Jedi Mind Trick on Professor Hawking.]()
![Hiding at the comic book store.]()
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![Sheldon trapped.]()
![Sheldon on his "spot."]()
![Sheldon in thought.]()
![The urn that Sheldon got for Leonard in case they worst happened during his surgery.]()
![Sheldon waiting for Leonard at the hospital. The teddy bear was for his stubbed toe.]()
![Worried about Leonard's surgery.]()
![Sheldon eating french toast sticks in Amy's car.]()
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![Helicopter terrorizing Sheldon.]()
![What do I do with this ring?]()
![Strongly disagree.]()
![Talking to Amy about relationships.]()
![Sheldon.]()
![Let's talk about Penny and the old glug-glug.]()
References
- ā Age revealed in The Russian Rocket Reaction; birthdate revealed in The Intimacy Acceleration
- ā Middle name revealed in The Adhesive Duck Deficiency
- ā Pet name and family name first revealed in The Luminous Fish Effect
- ā full list of degrees revealed in The Love Car Displacement
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