TITLE: Big Bang Theory Reference to Formal Logic
QUESTION [20 upvotes]: In the second episode "The Junior Professor Solution" of the 8th season of the Big Bang Theory, there exists a brief moment where Sheldon Cooper references one of his boards with what for a brief moment looked like a bunch of statements in some formal system which has modal operators and quantification.  But there also exists an "ess" phrase in one of the strings of symbols.  I also couldn't tell what the rules of the system they would have referenced or what the axioms were.
Did the Big Bang Theory reference a formal system or just write symbols that looked like a formal system to an untrained eye (my guess is the later)?

REPLY [28 votes]: This is Gödel's ontological proof, which is fully explained on Wikipedia (see the link).
I find this to be an incredible easter egg, since the proof is something which Sheldon says he doesn't understand. And Sheldon has expressed more than once that he doesn't believe in the existence of god.
(Originally I thought this would be something pertaining to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was brought up a couple of scenes before this showed up. But upon re-examination of the screenshot, it didn't seem that way anymore.)
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