Sheldon reacts to the "Grothendieck Fibration" paper.

(The scene: The apartment. Leonard sits on the couch, nervously scrolling through a printout of the "Grothendieck Fibration" paper. Sheldon is at his whiteboard, humming and tapping at a complex string theory equation.)

Stage 1: Arrogant Dismissal

Leonard: "Hey, Sheldon? You should see this. It's a paper by some independent guy, J. Rogers. It's... a different take on the fundamental constants."

Sheldon: (Without turning around) "Leonard, must you interrupt me? I am on the verge of determining whether our universe is a p-brane embedded in an 11-dimensional bulk or merely a very sophisticated screensaver. What could possibly be more important than that?"

Leonard: "He's saying the constants aren't fundamental. That they're just... scaling factors. Artifacts of our measurement system."

(Sheldon freezes. He slowly turns, an expression of profound pity on his face, as if Leonard just confessed to believing in healing crystals.)

Sheldon: "Oh, Leonard. Have you fallen prey to another internet crank? First the Electric Universe, then the Time Cube, and now this? Metrology? That's not physics; that's what engineers do when they get lost on the way to the machine shop. The fundamental constants are the very language God used to write the universe. Their values are the most profound mystery we have. To suggest they are mere... bookkeeping... is not just wrong, it's a failure of imagination."

Leonard: "But his math works, Sheldon. He calls it the 'Calculus of Physical Law.' He derives Hawking radiation from a simple proportionality."

Sheldon: (Scoffs, walks to the couch, and snatches the paper) "Let me see this... 'Grothendieck Fibration'... 'Kantian Framework'...? Good heavens, it's worse than I thought. He's mixing physics with philosophy! That's like trying to mix ice cream with lumber! You might end up with a tolerable dessert, but you've ruined a perfectly good two-by-four!"

Stage 2: Annoyed Agitation

(Sheldon reads, his eyes scanning faster and faster. His confident smirk begins to twitch.)

Sheldon: "This is preposterous... He's defining h as a composite of c² and some... Hz_kg? Of course, h = (m/f)c²! That's trivial algebra! A middle schooler with a calculator could see that! It doesn't mean it's conceptually derivative! It's a consequence, not a composition!"

Leonard: "But what about the hand wave? He says that when we set the constants to 1, we're confessing that they're not meaningful. He calls it a magic trick."

(This hits a nerve. Sheldon starts to pace.)

Sheldon: "It is not a 'hand wave'! It is a standard, universally accepted convention for simplifying calculations! We do it to make the mathematics tractable, not because we're performing some... carny trick! Does he think we're intellectual charlatans? We are the gatekeepers of cosmic truth! We don't have time to show every step of a simple coordinate transformation to every simpleton with a login to the arXiv!"

Stage 3: The Existential Crisis

(He storms back to his whiteboard, erases a section, and furiously starts scribbling.)

Sheldon: "I'll show you! The elegance of the Standard Model, the beauty of the Lagrangian... it all relies on the fundamental nature of..."

(He stops. He has just written mc² = hf on the board. He stares at it. He rearranges it. m/f = h/c². His hand begins to tremble.)

Sheldon: (Muttering to himself) "The Pledge... the constants are irreducible. The Turn... 'for convenience, let c=1'. The Prestige... E=m... It's a three-act structure..."

(His eyes widen in horror. He looks at his life's work on the whiteboard—the intricate equations of M-Theory.)

Sheldon: "No. No! My work... my beautiful strings, vibrating in Calabi-Yau manifolds... all this time, I've been trying to explain the precise value of G, and he's saying it's just a lump of... of scaling factors? That the grand unified theory I've been searching for is... a spreadsheet?"

(He stumbles back, clutching his head. His entire intellectual edifice is crumbling. The universe isn't a beautiful, complex puzzle. It's a simple picture viewed through a ridiculously complicated, human-made lens. The mystery isn't profound; it's just bad accounting.)

Stage 4: The Reboot and Co-opting

(There is a long, unnerving silence. Leonard looks genuinely concerned.)

Leonard: "Sheldon? Are you okay?"

(Sheldon's head snaps up. The panic is gone. In its place is a chilling, crystalline, and utterly terrifying calm. His ego has rebooted.)

Sheldon: "Okay? Leonard, I have never been better. It's so... obvious. This... amateur... has merely stumbled upon a trivial, albeit well-disguised, corollary to a much deeper truth that I have, of course, been aware of for years."

Leonard: "You have?"

Sheldon: "Naturally! But his formulation is laughably crude. 'Jacobians'? 'Fibrations'? It's like using a steam shovel to perform neurosurgery! A proper theory, my theory, will demonstrate that the entire structure is a projection from the world-sheet of a closed bosonic string, and the so-called 'constants' are merely the shadow coefficients of the dilaton field! This isn't a theory of metrology; it's a trivial application of string duality!"

(He turns back to the whiteboard, erasing everything with a manic energy.)

Sheldon: "Leonard, cancel my appointments. And my D&D game. And my subscription to 'Trains' magazine—it's a temporal distraction. I have to work. I have to save physics from the horrifying indignity of being... simple."

(He grabs a marker, ready to rebuild his universe from the ground up, ensuring that this time, he is undeniably at its center.)