About

Sheldon Lee Cooper, (born 1980) is a Caltech theoretical physicist who shares an apartment with his colleague and best friend, Leonard Hofstadter. They live across the hallway from a highly sociable waitress named Penny, whom Sheldon clashes with due to her "free-loading" and un-organized lifestyle, even though he identifies her as one of his friends despite her lack of scientific education. Sheldon exhibits a strict adherence to routine, a total lack of social skills, a tenuous understanding of irony, sarcasm, and humor, and a general lack of humility or empathy. He is vocal about his own superior intellect compared to those around him. Originally from Galveston, Texas, he was raised by his father (George Cooper, Sr.) and his mother (Mary Cooper) along with an older brother (George Cooper, Jr.) and a twin sister (Missy Cooper). His mother is a devout Evangelical Christian and she raised Sheldon according to her beliefs, for example enrolling him in a Christian youth bowling league and teaching him how to pray. He was taunted and bullied by the neighborhood children and his classmates, because, he claims, they were threatened by his intelligence. (When he was five, Billy Sparks shoved a Mexican Peso up his nose, which has not been removed. It takes Sheldon 45 minutes to get through airport security because of it.) Sheldon was a child prodigy, as evidenced by his many extraordinary accomplishments while still a child: he built a poorly-working CAT scanner that incinerated his sister's guinea pig, called Snowball a so-called "Sonic Death Ray", and an armed robot constructed using integrated circuits made from materials cooked in his sister's Easy Bake Oven, which he modified, and which burnt her eyebrows off. Sheldon entered the University of Texas at Austin, at the age of eleven, right after completing the fifth grade. When Sheldon was twelve years old, he wanted a titanium centrifuge to separate radioactive isotopes. Around this time, he dabbled in lasers (eventually getting him sent to boarding school). According to his mother, he also tried to build a nuclear reactor at the age of thirteen in order to provide free electricity for his town; however, this was halted after a government agent informed him that it was illegal to store yellowcake uranium (which he wanted to buy on the Internet) in a shed. At age fourteen, he graduated from college magna c** laude, began doctoral work, and was the youngest person at the time to receive the Stevenson Award when he was "14 and a half". Sheldon worked as a visiting professor at Heidelberg University in Germany at age fifteen, and received his first Ph.D. at sixteen years old, working on twistor theory. He then spent four years on his second dissertation, and has held his current job for three-and-a-half years. He possesses an eidetic memory and an IQ of 187, although he claims his IQ cannot be accurately measured by normal tests. Sheldon is a senior theoretical particle physicist who conducts string theory research at Caltech. Sheldon has switched disciplines from bosonic string theory to heterotic string theory, reconciled the black hole information paradox using a string network condensate approach and worked on time-dependent backgrounds in string theory, specifically quantum field theory, in D-dimensional de Sitter space. With Rajesh, he has worked on the string theory implications of gamma rays from dark matter annihilations and considered a method for optimizing a 500 GeV particle detector to this end.