The Big Bang Theory has reached European shores. A CBS comedy that began playing in the United States last year, The Big Bang Theory centres on room-mates Leonard and Sheldon, and Leonard's attraction to the pretty girl who moves into the apartment across the hall. So far, so uninspired. But Leonard and Sheldon are no ordinary room-mates: they're physicists.

Yes, the two lead characters in a primetime comedy are post-doc physicists. This is a whole new experience.

In times past, it seemed that if a writer wished to suggest a frightening level of intelligence, a certain social ineptness or remoteness, or, moving down the scale, a sense of amorality or even pure evil, the (usually minor) character would be introduced as a physicist — often, reflecting other concerns of the day, a nuclear physicist.

Sheldon and Leonard retain something of the caricature (although it's moved with the fashion of the times from nuclear physics to string theory). As characters for entertainment, of course they're exaggerated stereotypes. They're clever and nerdy and hopeless with the opposite sex, in exactly the ways that any non-physicist would expect a physicist to be. But they're funny too. They have lives and experiences, and yearn (at least Leonard does) for what's beyond their experience. These physicists are people. Although a stereotype never matches any real individual, it is always based on an element of truth. Sheldon and Leonard — well, they're a little bit me, a little bit you.

Leonard: At least I didn't have to invent 26 dimensions to get the math to work. Sheldon: I didn't invent them. They're there. Leonard: Yeah? In what universe? Sheldon: In all of them, that's the point!

The real star of The Big Bang Theory is the physics. Sheldon and Leonard convince because their dialogue and hence their characters are properly rounded with accurate physics. No Star Trek-style antimatter nonsense here. Instead, there are witty barbs about derivatives and the many dimensions of string theory. Sheldon attends a fancy-dress party, costumed in a suit of irregularly spaced stripes, as 'the Doppler effect' — he offers the obvious sound effect as a clue to his disguise. Best of all are the flipcharts and whiteboards that adorn the set of the apartment and the university offices (these are, supposedly, Caltech physicists): each is exquisitely scrawled in multi-colour marker pen with equations and diagrams, all real physics.

It's a delight, and a credit to the CBS producers and their science consultant, UCLA physicist David Saltzberg. In one episode, Sheldon has been playing with quantum chromodynamics on his living-room flipchart. He is furious to discover that someone has tampered with his derivation, arriving instead at a negative β function rather than the positive one he had achieved. The culprit, it turns out, is Leonard's colleague and erstwhile love interest, Leslie, who shrugs and points out that she's made it correct: in QCD, unless the β function is negative you don't get asymptotic freedom of quarks.

Seriously, that's the punchline. It's performed with such skill that it really is funny. It matters to these characters, it becomes a human concern. Admittedly, The Big Bang Theory may not qualify as a comedy classic in the long term with the widest audience, but it strikes a blow for physics in mainstream culture.

Such is also the intention — not only for physics but for science as a whole — of Columbia physicist Brian Greene, co-founder of the World Science Festival, which kicks off in New York on 28 May. On the festival website (http://www.worldsciencefestival.com), Greene says, “The World Science Festival aims to spark a movement in which science shifts from the cultural outskirts to the cultural centre.” Over five days, an impressive line-up — including Nobel winners, actors Alan Alda and Michael York, curators of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, philosophers and dancers — will present, discuss and perform science.

Science deserves celebration, but most of all it deserves recognition. It should be no more unusual for film or television characters to be physicists than to be police, lawyers, doctors or anything else. It's always the human story that matters, and that entertains. Science is full of human stories.

Sheldon and Leonard may be physics geeks, but they'd be nice guys to have across the hall.