You could argue that of all the freeze-dried cornmeal on television, The Simpsons most accurately depicts human behaviour – even though the cast are bright yellow. And although its scripts aren't any substitute for university texts, viewers with a scientific bent are still catered for, with plot lines including perpetual motion machines, time travel, cloning and robotics. Science greats Andre Heck, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking and Dudley Herschbach (winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry) have even had cameos. Seeing a market for bemused viewers who might want to learn more about the science hinted at in The Simpsons, Paul Halpern, a professor at the University of Sciences in Philadelphia, has written What's Science Ever Done For Us? (which, it says on the cover, is not official Simpsons merchandise).
Halpern is surely one of the few writers in history to have found himself crafting chapters that begin with a synopsis of a cartoon show only to suddenly leap to explanations of Einstein's theory of relativity or Planck's constant. His writing is as fast-paced and slick as the show, but the dramatic shifts in subject matter sometimes hit you like a wet three-eyed fish across the face. Still, has there ever been a better platform from which to launch a popular science book?
Apart from explaining the great theories and findings in the fields of biology, physics, artificial intelligence and cosmology, Halpern delivers a few unexpected treats along the way. For instance, did you know that the 'tomacco', a tomato-tobacco hybrid created by Homer after he uses plutonium as a fertiliser, has been grown in real life by a dedicated Simpsons fan? (The tomatoes are allegedly normal but the leaves contain some nicotine.) Or that, since 1999, Vienna has hosted a cocktail-mixing competition for robots? The biggest surprise, and perhaps the reason so many scientific in-jokes make it onto The Simpsons, is that the show's writers boast, between them, a bachelor of science in physics and one in mathematics, a masters and a PhD in computer science, a PhD in applied mathematics and a PhD in inorganic chemistry. Who says science doesn't pay?
