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MythBuster Developing Light-Weight Vehicle Armor
gearystwatcher writes "MythBusters' Jamie Hyneman has been developing blast-resistant, light-weight armor for use on US military vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan based on his work with show co-host Adam Savage. 'We had a lot of experience in the show dealing with explosives, obviously in ways and situations that are outside the norm. This is very revealing, because when you see something outside the norm you get to see what the boundaries of the phenomenon are,' Hyneman tells The Reg during an interview for the new MythBusters' season."
These always seem to pop up on any Mythbusters thread. No, they're not scientists. They're not pretending to be scientists. And nope, they don't have time to spend years with a research team adjusting for every variable in every experiment in some carefully controlled lab somewhere.
What they *are* are very knowledgeable laymen, applying basic scientific methodology to fairly straight-foward questions in an entertaining fashion. They bring the basics of scientific testing to the masses. They teach concepts such as skepticism and empiricism to a population that too often relies on hearsay and superstition in their beliefs about the physical world.
No, they're not scientists. But that doesn't mean they have nothing to teach or that there is no value in their experiments. As the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison could probably attest, sometimes even a layman has insight to offer.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Well they said it was a thin layer of armor, so I'm assuming duct tape.
So, is it going to be made out of 18 layers of pizza, or 6 layers of phone books?
Both, in interwoven delicious layers. A nice advantage to this solution, after you take a blast, you just browse the armor plating for the number of the local pizza place, and you can have repair parts delivered!
Next I bet you're going to tell me that Scientologists aren't scientists!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Aren't these the same guys who for several years were shielding themselves from explosions with what they thought was bulletproof plexiglass, until they finally tried shooting it with a gun in an episode on bulletproof glass and only then realized that it wasn't bulletproof at all?
It's actually composite plating. Duct tape over electrical tape, with explosive reactive armour on the outside. The ER plates are made of C4 and disassembled microwave ovens.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
XKCD does a good job summing it up: http://xkcd.com/397/.
While careful controlled tests are important to science and critical to many discoveries, that is not the core of what science is. The core is that ideas are tested by experiment. It is the process of saying "Hmmm, maybe X causes Y, let's try it and find out!"
That's the basis of what they do, and the basis of science. The higher level of rigor are important as well, but they aren't the main thing. Scientific thinking and action in every day life does not mean doing a laboratory based double blind study of every little thing. You'd never make it to work if you did that for everything. It does mean holding your idea up to scrutiny and testing them out. Mythbusters helps promote that.
Also as a side note they are often more rigorous than it appears. If you've watched some outtakes/behind the scenes stuff it turns out that they often do more testing than you see on screen. Again that's not to say they do everything grade-A lab proper, but it can be more than it appears.
It's just sad when average is seen as something special.
That may well be true for some segment of their viewers. Just the same, a lot of people like watching the show because its applied engineering. They get to build and do things which many of us simply don't have time, budget, or both to tinker. Basically, the show provides an outlet in which many of us vicariously enjoy.
At the end of the day, blowing shit up is fun. Verifying, if even a simpleton approach, classic science experiments is fun. And even though they constantly deviate from the scientific method and constantly completely screw things up, they show can still be fun - even if they are wrong. Its really more about the experience than the result. And if you can get a satisfactory result, its all the better.
Of course, none of that means they are smart, engineers, or scientists.
Having actually met Tori in real life, I can assure you that they are all pretty smart. They do mathematical models behind the scenes to back up what they are saying, and yes, they do dumb it down when they are filming, because most of their audience couldn't give a crap about models and math and everything that science actually is, their audience wants to see myths broken or proven and maybe see something blow up along the way.
Moral of the story: don't judge people based on their TV personalities.
Well, you never know, they might actually stumble upon something valid. In fact, they might have already discovered something, and the press release could be lagging significantly behind the development like it does so often with military developments.
They have practical experience:
* blowing stuff up in creative but specific ways using improvised explosive devices, of qualities equal to or exceeding what you'd see in the field
* instrumenting the entire scenario for data analysis later in such a way that the instrumentation is not destroyed
* preventing other stuff from getting destroyed by said explosion
You can spend all day failing to come up with a material with the right properties no matter which angle you attack the problem from. Sure, you could model the physics until your brain leaks out of your ears, and you can also waste inordinate time and materials testing via a "Okay, how about now? Now? Now?" methodology. In the end, you can get similar results by calculation or experiment. Check out Damascus steel, for example - we haven't completely figured that out yet, and we certainly can't reproduce it, but people were making it and you can believe they weren't using modern science to design it. I do believe in the value of science, but it doesn't always need to trump experience.
The guys who experience the effective improvised explosives in the field don't make it back to tell you how it was built, ya know? :(