For examples of better myth study, I did like the one that tried to duplicate the “shooting a tank of propane with a 9mm and it explodes” scene from Casino Royale. They seemed to cover that one OK. And the exploding water heater - impressive demonstration of the force contained in the heater. The “motorcycle flip” was well done, I thought.
Of course, there’s not a lot to get wrong there.
I watched it once, many years ago and hated it. Never seen it since. Don’t understand how it stays on TV. 
My problem with the show, along with everything said already pretty much, was they tried to “bust” something that was documented to have happened at some point in the past. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something with fumes that accumulated and ultimately exploded. They even showed a news-paper clipping of the report of when it actually fucking happened! :rolleyes:
So why are you wasting my fucking time?
I thought they filmed the episode in cool weather, and that’s why they were having to dress warmly for the A/C test.
But there were a lot of problems with that episode. They used a type of vehicle that would be least affected by those parameters (full-size SUVs). And they ran two sets of tests with multiple parameters changed (different way of measuring MPG, and different speed). And when the two tests produced conflicting results, they arbitrarily declared one to be a better test than the other, and declared the myth “busted.”
I’ve got no problem with that. Some of us enjoy seeing what it takes to reenact or recreate those events.
For stupid premise I submit when they tested the curving bullet from the movie Wanted. Can you make a bullet’s trajectory curve by slinging the gun in a horizontal motion as you fire? No, it’s a silly question. Let’s move on. Not have each member of the build team try it and then get Grant to build a robot arm so we can really put this one to bed.
Science is reproducible.
There have also been news reports of wigs stopping bullets. The news lies.
Do you believe the result would have been different if they had exactly matched the airplane’s speed?
Note that even the pilot did not think he would be able to take off in the circumstances they were testing.
My problem with the show goes with what Sage Rat said about wigs stopping bullets. Now, I’ve never heard that but often times things come together just right to make something happen that isn’t reliably reproducible. Maybe once a wig did stop a bullet. Maybe it was a bullet shot from 7000 feet away and it basically ‘landed’ on the wig, but the person felt it hit their head and found a hot bullet in the wig, showed it to the cops and ‘wigs can stop bullets’ is born. Then MB comes in, unloads a few guns a few wigs and says ‘busted’.
This happens all the time with them, they try once or twice and declare something busted even though, given the right set of circumstances it seems pretty possible, maybe not reproducible, but possible.
Why they shot bullets at the ice for half a day until they got one to spin, I don’t know. Somehow, they must have known that was real. OTOH, why waste their time disproving that you can run on water. Well no shit Sherlock. Way to waste 100K of your budget. I’m sure it’s not cheap to drag all your equipment out to a location shot for two days.
Please, please, please can we not. Please, go somewhere else and do that. (Not trying to be mean/rude, but that’s going to derail the tread).
Check out smyths. It’s a subreddit where users post episodes that have the repetition edited out. An episode of Mythbusters shrinks to about 30 minutes after the filler is cut out.
Ha ha! Nice try. If you want to rehash it with me, start a new thread and PM me.
I withdraw my question, your honour.
I have absolutely no problems with their TV-show-with-a-budget limitations on scienctific testing. The results aren’t exactly published in journals, although they encourage doubt among viewers and welcome valid complaints and revisit myths when necessary.
The bottom line is they test stuff. The details can get ironed out.
They are supposed to always see what it takes to reproduce a myth but, the build team in particular, does not always.
I think that they keep things like this - going out to the gun range and fire off a few bullets - as filler. It’s something they can go out and do in a few hours that fills a whole segment, where most other segments are cut down from a full week or two’s worth of hard labor. Basically, they can’t ramp up every single myth and still hit their deadlines, so they need to prioritize time based on entertainment value.
At the end of the day, the results of none of their mythbusting is going to save or help the world in any way and they get paid for butts in chairs, not good science. They are science educators and want to do a good job of teaching some basic science for the home audience, but that’s impossible if no one is watching because the show is tedious to watch, due to running the same tests over and over, or because nothing interesting ever happens since their budget is too evenly spread across all myths to ever have a good spectacular result.
I’m sure that they’d happily take a few spare million dollars and months to do out every myth as good as can be. But that’s just not practical. They’re going to have to compromise as they go about their business, the only question is which myths are going to take the cut and to what extent.
OR, potentially, they need to find single myths that can sustain full or multiples episodes and find ways to maintain interest across all that time. (I suspect that they’ll still have to use small sample sizes, though, since repetition is good for science but bad for entertainment). And that may be the direction they go with the new season.
The onres thast bugged me were the three episodes where they tried to duplicate “Archimedes Burning Mirror”, for obvious reasons.
The first time they did it, they really did try to duplicate what Archimedes was originally said to have done, constructing a single quasi-paraboloidal mirror from sections of flat mirror. But Adam did it wrong, using a crude (very crude) mechanical gauge to set the angle. As you could tell from the “focal” spot that resulted, the focus job wasn’t very good. I’m nolt suirprised that it didn’t work.
For the second case, they brought in MIT Mechanical Engineering professor David R. Wallace, who had duplicated the experiment using multiple square mirrors about a foot on a side on a rooftop at MIT. But when he came to California to do it, they had him using copper mirrors instead of modern silvered mirrors. This might have been more period-accurate, but it was unexpected, and they had to spend a lot of time polishing the copper mirrors, which are, in any case, not as flat as modern silvered glass mirrors. They also used not-dry wood. (I talked with Professor Wallace at length about his experience). Wallace’s focus method was to cover all but one mirror at a time and orient that one correctly, then go rapidly on to the next, then to whip all the coverings off as rapidly as possible. IOf you do it rapidly enough, the sun doesn’t move much between start and end of alignment (Wallace called Adam an “aligning machine” for his speed at this)
For the third case, they used a lot of students holding a lot of modern silvered mirrors, and used a piece of netting to let them see where the reflected spot was going. This failed to ignite the ship, but did dazzle Jamie in his boat. Thjey declared the myth “Busted”
The thing is, this experiment HAS been performed successfully – in 1973 a Greek scientist, Ioannes Sakkas fot a team of volunteers with miorror “shields” and set fire to a floating boat. (60 soldiers aiming at a boat 160 feet away. Hedidn’t give the mirror size, but I estimate something like 1.5 square feet). In 2000 a German team at Osnabruck used 500 mirrors measuring about 0.2 sq feet each at a distance of 50 meters. They were able to set fire to the sails.
I analyzed the numbers for these and other attempts, including the Mythbusters trials. For these I used analysis which took into account the spread of the beam due to the angular subtense of the sun, and assumed perfectly flat and perfectly reflecting mirrors (not actually very far off, with modern aluminized mirrors). It’s in the second chapter of my book. If properly lined up, the second and third mythbusters attempts give about as much and significantyly more solar fluz per unit area on target than the Osnabruck methiod. All three Mythbusters trial would give more than Ioannes Sakkas’ effort.
So what’s the problem? A big part of it is the critical one – proper alignment. There is a very simple and more accurate method of properly aligning a mirror or heliograph to reflect light from the sun toward a target. It was, as far as I kn\ow, first derived as part of a plan to enable downed aviators in WWII to signal to ships. It was described in an Article in Applied Optics for October 1973 (Vol. 12, #10 Albert C. Claus “On Archimedes’ Burning Glass”, the article that arguably set off the modern debate on this topic). Hal Clement also describes it in his SF novel Cycle of Fire, which is where I first encountered it. It’s a nifty little method, and guarantees that you accurately tilt the mirror along both directions to properly reflect sunlight to any desired point. I’ve tried it myself, and it works very well – much better than the netting used in the Mythbusters third attempt.
There are a lot of YouTube videos, as well, showing people using banks of mirrors in ther backyards to set fire to model ships.
And for those of you who object that ships are WET, Prof. Wallace was abl;e to dry out absolutely soaked wood near the end of his Mythbusters episode and get it charred. Less soaked wood would’ve vcaught faster and from farther away.
Disclaimer:
I don’t believe that Archimedes actually did anything like this (nor did Proclus, said to perfortm a similar feat a long time later. Proclus is they guy said to have used banks of soldiers, each with an independent mirror-shield). The first account of his using such a mirror-weapon dates from centuries after his time. Furthermore, although not impossible to make, really good quality and flat* copper or brass mirrors are not trivial to make. I know – I’ve tried.
Furthermore, it is a toss-up as to whether he would’ve come up with the targeting method developed for the US Navy and described by Claus.
But my point is that, with the available knowledge and technology, this COULD have been done. There is nothing to have prevented the construction of a large “burning glass” or a trained team of mirror-shield-bearing “adaptive optics squad” And Mythbusters ought to have been able to demonstrate it.
I tend to see a lot of fudging. I have only watched the show a few times, but have noticed a pattern.
So instead of using element B in X environment for Y amount of time, they use Element B2 in environment X2 in Z amount of time. The results don’t match the myth! It’s busted!
In other words, they do a simulation of the myth, not the actual myth. The results are thus meaningless in terms of proving or disproving the myth.
An early episode that showed a lack of effort in getting important details right was the one about the police car in American Graffiti, where the rear end is yanked out of the police car. The movie car had a leaf spring suspension, which is held under the car with four bolts. Their test car was a late model Crown Vic, with a much more robust suspension. Lots of cars were built the way the old police car was, and I still say they could have found a test car with the correct suspension style pretty easily.
Fair enough. I think what irritated me was the overwhelming tone was “This *couldn’t *have happened, and WE"LL PROVE IT!”
Well, it clearly did. So the Mythbusers were jerkin’ it. And being assholes about it.
Its like claiming the Bismarck couldn’t possibly have got that lucky shot into the powder magazine of the Hood and sunk it in seconds. Hell, build replicas and test it till you all die of Alzheimer’s and you’ll never replicate it. Plenty of evidence that it did indeed happen once before, however.
What?!? You don’t want to wade through hundreds of posts about a magical conveyor belt capable of miraculously precise synchronization with the acceleration of an airplane with frictionless bearings in its landing gear?
Me neither.
There was an episode several years ago where they were testing whether a squad of soldiers marching in step could bring down a suspension bridge. Adam built a model suspension bridge and they put lots of little marching feet on it that were pneumatically controlled to all march in time. But Adam’s model was all wrong. It was free-standing; the ends weren’t connected to anything and the deck was welded together and probably would have stayed up even if the cables were taken away. In a real suspension bridge, the cables are under tension, and the main cables are attached to massive stone or concrete anchorages at the ends of the bridge. It probably would have been hard to build that, but it would have been a better test.