“Alt wisdom comes from spelling terrors.”

- fenzel

Why is it that, in teen high-school sit-coms, all events that happen seem to happen to same the core group of friends? In all the possible ways that high school life could have played out, how is it even remotely possible for all the things that happened to Zack Morris in Saved by the Bell to have actually happened to the same person and not to have happened to a larger distribution of people in the same population (perhaps some of whom wore belts when they tucked in their shirts)?

One easy explanation is that Somebody wrote Saved by the Bell so that it works that way. The complexity and low probability of the glee club episode and the boys vs. girls episode involving precisely the same people proves that it must have been planned. Screech cannot have come up with all those crazy inventions; they must be planted there by a “writer.” A.C. Slater cannot have always happened to have turned the seat backwards before sitting on it – somebody must have planned it that way to teach us all a message about his character.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that anybody just wrote a show like Saved by the Bell. Next thing you’re going to tell me is there is a big Peter Engel in the sky who made it all happen, and that TV deity Aaron Spelling sent his daughter to live among the Saved by the Bell cast and love the least among them. Crazy talk!

But there is another explanation, borne to us by the cosmology of the 1960s and 1970s and a spelling mistake I make all the time for no reason. I am of course, talking about The Anthropic Principal.

The anthropic principal gives us an alternative explanation for various extremely unlikely things that we encounter in teen high school sit-coms. It frees us of the need to ascribe the rules of The Max or other such places to the sit-com version of legal positivism. It’s elegant, it’s startling, and it’s real.

On the two types of the Anthropic Principal, plus a bonus piece of topical humor after the jump –

There come times, in the course of human events, whereby an official-unofficial OTI Staff Scientist such as myself feels compelled to write about pop-cultural issues which he or she (statistically: he) finds irksome on a professional level.  Back to The Future is a nearly endless font of these issues for me—from the obligatory complications surrounding causality in time-travel paradoxes to hoverboards which don’t work above water to the continued reminder of the sheer mathematical improbability of  Huey Lewis and the News.  But as my esteemed colleagues have already touched on these with great aplomb, I’ve got some another problem to Overthink™ today.

And oh yes, there will be math involved.

[Because what Overthinking It really needs is more Matts, we present this BTTF guest post from Matthew Silver. —Ed.]

Arguably, no movie involving time travel can ever actually make sense in the realm of continuity. I have to give tremendous credit to the Back To The Future writers for taking it on in the first place. This series has it all: paradox, parallel timelines, and altering history both past and future.

As an audience, we all cope with the discrepancies in different ways. Some of us rationalize the impossible because it’s the only way we can enjoy the reality presented to us. (Have you seen Heroes this season?) Some of us believe wholeheartedly in “suspension of disbelief” and are all too understanding of the limitations of Hollywood (Ross, Joey, and Chandler love the Die Hard films, yet they don’t hesitate to accept Bruce Willis when he shows up on Friends as a guest character). And then there are those of us who just unconditionally believe everything we see and hear. [Not on this site. —Ed.]

For those of us who will never be satisfied without a little digging, I present the following theories.