What a bunch of downers! I love the Mythbusters. These are people popularizing the use of testing, math, logical deduction and other tools to determine the truth. They are not scientists, and don’t purport to be. They aren’t guaranteeing that the results are scientifically accurate. We’re simply watching two smart, very handy guys try to solve problems intelligently. What’s not to like?
Sure, they get the science wrong on occasion. But they usually get the methodology and philosophy right.
Hell, it’s fun just watching them build the stuff. They’re a very talented crew.
He could have also modeled it easily, but it’s marginally more boring to watch someone set up an engineering model in MathCad or whatever than it is to watch them play a dull version of Robot Wars and mug for the camera for twenty minutes.
The whole idea of bridges collapsing under marching soldiers comes from the early industrial era, when iron construction was poorly understood and beams, struts and rivets failed for what were considered mysterious reasons. (Mainly that iron wasn’t wood and didn’t react to time and stress the same way.) Sympathetic vibrations were thought to be the cause of some collapses, so soldiers were taught to break step over bridges, and here we are almost 200 years later…
Do you know what episode this was? Or could you explain more about what they did? I’m curious about it. I’ve seen some Mythbusters, but usually just random episodes from when there is a marathon of episodes on.
It’s this kind of thinking that leads to Discovery Channel documentaries on modern sightings of megalaodon, Hitler’s Aliens, or whether sharknado is real. Lack of critical thinking leads to anti-vaxxers, moon-landing hoaxers, and the success of Nigerian scammers. Is that the world you want to live in?
Well, worse, it leads to macgyverism, where the gist of the idea is right but the implementation is nonsense. (Such as cobbling together two radio receivers from the usual scraps and using them to triangulate a transmission signal 25 miles away… with a 10-foot baseline.)
Hey, I loves me some Mythbusters, but there’s no denying they sometimes either get things hilariously wrong, or deliberately use a crappy methodology to string out the suspense a bit.
I’ll nominate the otherwise fairly interesting ‘bronze age torpedo’ episode. The first couple of tries, they used fairly large solid rockets as propulsion. When they mentioned that the thrust for one of these was something like five times the weight of the torpedo, then acted shocked when the whole rig went straight up in the air, my eyes rolled like marbles. I’m pretty sure they knew what the result was going to be and just did it to pad out the segment with some entertaining pyrotechnics-gone-wrong action.
Come to think about it, however, they’ve had several items legitimmately go off the reservation. I seem to recall a car on one of ther ‘experiments’ leaping over an embankment and almost landing on a busy highway, and another time putting a cannonball through someone’s house.
Not to harp on it, but this is why I find the show unwatchable. There are other shows that really have only a minute or two of content but find entertaining and informative ways to frame that bite. MB just mugs and vamps and wastes time in the most tedious and annoying ways - three or four minutes of “discussion” over a point not worth one short declarative sentence, much time spent following someone from point A to point B, long sequences on efforts clearly destined to fail without teaching anyone anything… bleh.
In a very early episode, Jamie off-handedly mentioned that a car colliding with another car going the same speed head on suffers twice as much damage as colliding with a solid wall. (Or is the same as colliding with a wall while going twice the speed. I forget.)
This raised a howl of protests and so they had to test it and the damage going the same speeds was the same in both cases as a second of thinking about the Physics would tell you. (A lot of Dopers have made this same mistake over the years, surprisingly enough.)
The most recent episode I watched was the Laws of Attraction one. Several experimental flaws. E.g., when showing the women photos and info on various men, they had them in a group. They were cheering/moaning/etc., so the test subjects choices were being influenced by others. They should have been shown the pictures alone. Also, given that the Build Team was running the test in the open (they audience even cheered for them), it wouldn’t take much to figure out what the test was for and people could change their responses accordingly. Not a good example of a real Scientific test.
(One personal observation: I’ve done the color/word cognitive conflict test on computer screens several times and found it hard. But I had no problem saying the right color while watching the samples in this episode. Distance/small size of the words must play a role.)
For a while the science channel had edited versions of the show that were just 1/2 hour. It felt kinda rushed so while folks may complain about the repetition it sometimes has its place.
That was from the 1st season, IIRC, when they had no budget, awkward editing (there was a part of the show where they showed Adam on the phone with a supplier - just his 1/2 of the conversation), and they were completely unknown (plus they had that stupid “Urban Legend Expert” at the end.
These days they would probably build a small bridge a foot above a pool and have a Marine Platoon march across it.
I disagree - besides being educators, and getting the next generation excited about science, I bet they have saved a few lives testing whether you can roll down a window or open a car door in a submerged car, by making it fun and crazy to watch.
They may have saved a life or two with the water heater shooting 400 feet in the air myth, too.
It gets kids excited about science. It makes being a geek a cool thing.
It didn’t prove anything. But the show made no claim that this was an experiment. They had already conducted the experiments, in which they had tried to find out if a small explosion could shatter the hardened cement without damaging the mixer. They found out it wasn’t possible.
So the experiments had been completed and the conclusion had been made. That’s when they decided to blow up the cement mixer with the leftover explosives. There was no pretense this was for science. They did it to have fun.
Even scientists are allowed to goof off in the lab after the work is done.
Yes, the experiments are often good, that one was great but I have been :dubious: about the “busted” etc conclusions. I have never heard it as “THIRTY FEET!”
The good of it is that it drives home the point that the way to learn about the world is to experiment. Even if the experiment isn’t very good, they’re trying, which is a heck of a lot more than most people do.
Garbage truck, not cement mixer. The test in the cement mixer was actually to see about small explosions cleaning dried cement off the mixer, so blowing it up at the end was an extension of that, if somewhat overblown (so to speak). Actually I enjoyed the cement mixer explosion.
But the garbage truck was both unconnected to the test, and repetitive.
Especially since “Lie detectors” do nothing of the sort and are run as more or less complete scams. The operator does a cold reading on you, decides if your guilty or not, then will tell you you passed or failed (usu failed) depending on that cold reading.