How Much Smarter Is Sheldon Than Oppenheimer?

It's easy to stack IQ points on a fictional character until they're precisely as smart as the project needs them to be. This, of course, is exactly how Sheldon Cooper's genius came to be — but it's also worth noting that IQs are quite random and arbitrary tools to measure intelligence in the first place. In fact, even Mensa, the organization that exclusively focuses on its members' IQ, fully admits on its website that IQ test scores are a bit of a mess and different tests can yield very different results. 

What's more, the entire concept of IQ tests has been called into question. Per Discover Magazine, the tests have several massive flaws that effectively render them untrustworthy as a method to measure genuine intelligence. Harvard professor Howard Gardner has also championed a theory that there are actually no less than eight types of intelligence, very few of which lend themselves to traditional IQ testing (via CNBC). Combine this with the fact that any comparison between Sheldon and Oppenheimer is effectively a comparison between a fictional character with a made-up IQ and a historical one with an untested one, and it's clear that there's no way to make the two characters test their cerebral might against each other in any meaningful way. 

Still, these comparisons are pretty fun — and since Sheldon's sky-high in-universe IQ is a whopping 22 points higher than Oppenheimer's guesstimated one, "The Big Bang Theory" character gets an easy win in this thoroughly unscientific contest.