"She grew up on a farm," he said. "She can fix a tractor. She can birth a calf, and she can do just about damn near anything that these guys can just sit around and talk about. ... She's an extraordinary character in her own right, but in a different world than theirs."

It is, Parsons said, "Book smarts versus barn smarts."

LOTS OF SHOWS have consultants, but "Big Bang" may be the only one that has a consultant who's an astrophysicist at UCLA.

So when you see all the mathematical formulas Sheldon and Leonard have written on white boards in their apartment, they're real.

"In fact, we're working on giving Sheldon an actual problem that he's going to be working on throughout the season so there's actual progress to the boards," said executive producer/co-creator Bill Prady. "We worked hard to get all the science right."

Not that even the guys who write the show understand all the jokes.

"We know that the parody of the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation (on Sheldon's board) was a parody of the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation, and it made our consultant laugh," Prady said.

LORRE WILL BE WORKING on both "Big Bang Theory" and "Two and a Half Men" this season — a tall task for any writer/producer.

"Well, first of all, I plan on dividing my time incompetently. There's no good way to do it," said Lorre, who's going to do it anyway "because I love both projects dearly, and I want to be close to both of them. So I'm learning as I go."

Lorre went to Norman Lear, who had a slew of shows on the air (including "All In the Family," "Sanford & Son," "Maude" and "The Jeffersons") all at the same time, to ask for advice.

"And he said, 'I basically worked like a dog.'... It's just throwing yourself into it and giving everything you've got. The opportunity to get a show on the air is so rare that you have to give it everything you've got because these chances, they don't come up very often, especially now. There's very few opportunities for comedies to get on the air anymore. So you throw yourself into it with sort of a neurotic abandon."

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