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Ask The Mythbusters
Who are the Mythbusters? Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman are the hosts of a unique and popular television show on the Discovery cable channel. Working from a background in the special effects industry and shooting on location at effects warehouse M5 Industries, Jamie and Adam attempt to shed light on hearsay, rumour, and myth. Along the way they usually run across a little bit of science, too. Today, you have a chance to put questions to them. We'll take the 15 best questions and pass them on to the gentlemen to be answered sometime soon after the Thanksgiving holiday. One question per comment, please, and keep things topical. We'll post their responses as soon as we get them back, so ask away.
I love the show, and maybe this would ruin the show's mainstream appeal, but I'd LOVE to have a couple of resident Physicists and Engineers advising them to get more rigorous results. Things get waaaaay too oversimplified.
To add to your jet engine example, my biggest gripe was always their "windows down vs. AC" gas-mileage test. All their test could possibly show was that at the one tested speed in the one tested vehicle, that's what happened. Even their retraction and correction later was oversimplified-- they explained that at some point, the speed of a vehicle becomes great enough that the AC wins over the windows-- but they acted like that number is the same for all cars regardless of all the other variables. (engine size, AC design, window size and position, and overall aerodynamic shape, to name a few)
How do you feel when you've finished exploring a myth in front of the cameras, knowing that your results are being closely scrutinized by geeks worldwide, and, in a lot of cases, by experts in their respective fields?
Behold the glorious bragging rights
In all fairness, this is two guys vs. MIT. Cut them some slack, eh?
It is impossible to prove a negative. When you do something like failing to flip a taxi with a jet engine and claim that busts the myth that a taxi can be flipped with a jet engine, do you feel you're misleading the public as to how science and logic work?
I was really surprised by the explanation given as to how the tracer rounds work. Phosphorus tips that ignite due to air friction?? Where did that come from?? When I was in school, the quartermaster in our Cadet Force took apart some tracer rounds to show us how they work. From the outside, they look like regular rounds, but once you pull the bullet from the casing you see that it's a bit longer than a normal bullet. The extra length is a hollow space that's filled with some kind of magnesium compound. When fired, the burning cordite sets fire to it.
The net effect is that the shooter sees the bright magnesium flare at the back of the bullet, rather than the target seeing a burning tip getting bigger. That's not to say that the target wouldn't see the flare anyway, but tracer is mostly used for the shooter's benefit, not to terrify the target...