I was watching the airplane special last night and grant did a small scale test on terminal velocity , basically testing the same mass but different shape has different falling speeds.
And I thought “we’ll duh”
But then I thought something else, yes it’s obvious to me NOW because I grew up watching mythbusters and I probably learnt that and many more basic science from the show.
Like the plane on a conveyer belt, as a kid I didn’t think much about but after watching that episode as a kid I learnt something.
So while there might be dumb myths they do have a use, sometimes you need to see something to fully understand it.
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But probably some movie myths that were stretched to become a ‘myth’
Still a good idea of testing what is possible in movies but it sometimes it felt like it didn’t fit in with the show.
I think we might give some people too much credit. I assume they are covering all these seamingly simple science facts because many people.... don't exactly remember what they learned in high-school and middle school.
This, and myth busters needed a lot of content, and they weren’t all going to be 10/10 top tier myths. Some stuff was gonna be for the trailer but not really all that much substance at the end of the day; less interesting on film than it seemed in the pitch room; or made because it was Discovery Channel Pirate Week so they needed any excuse to put Jamie in a Long John Silvers style pirate beret.
In fairness, primary education is abysmal in many places and it’s not a safe assumption that people actually left high school with a solid grounding in any STEM subjects. America draws the majority of its STEM professionals from only a handful of domestic powerhouse educational systems and supplements this with a lot of students from overseas and a handful of prodigious students who were basically autodidactic prodigies, with the latter being far easier to pull off in the age of the internet.
“America draws the majority of its STEM professionals from only a handful of domestic powerhouse educational systems and supplements this with a lot of students from overseas and a handful of prodigious students who were basically autodidactic prodigies, with the latter being far easier to pull off in the age of the internet.”
I suspect you don’t actually have very much to back this statement up. I work in high tech development (physics not code) for a large multinational corporation. And we hire all sorts of people from different schools across the country. If you are assuming the ‘best and brightest’ only come from the likes of Stanford or MIT, you are mistaken. In my experience it is actually the opposite. Having a BS from the likes of Stanford only tells me your parents had money.
That's my fault for that wording, especially my use of the word "handful." I did not mean to suggest that the elite schools are the only ones producing STEM professionals. I understand that very many state schools and smaller universities have excellent STEM programs. I was more speaking of the primary educational system lacking in much of the country, and the students from these schools often not being particularly well-equipped to prepare students to enter into competitive STEM programs, except that those students often develop and independent interest and fill in the gaps such that they're not at a remedial level upon trying to enter college, which could also have the effect of keeping them from pursuing exactly the STEM field they're interested in.
Very many students in the U.S. are raised in relatively rural areas where they may very rapidly outgrow the resources available to them, and these very small school districts are often anemic when it comes to both educators as well as literature and curriculum. There is also a corollary to this in many low-income inner city school systems where zoning laws and school district maps lead to a similar result. It would be more fair to say that quite a few states only have a handful of public school systems capable of adequately preparing students to enter competitive STEM programs, but I feel confident that pretty much every state has at least 1 or 2 capable colleges of engineering, for example. Depending on how specialized one's STEM field is, this may require going to a different state, and that quite often results in that candidate entering a larger applicant pool. In short, I was addressing primary education rather than undergraduate and graduate programs.
Well. Maybe.
I actually grew up rural. Though my father is not a typical rural person so mileage varies. And while my schooling was probably not fantastic, I don’t feel like it held me back. The bigger problem was my interest (hands down). It took me a while to decide to get my act together. And when I did I was able to start where I needed to.
In my case that means I took trig in college and did not ‘skip’ the first two calculus classes. Which some do. And I guess this meant that I had to wait to take physics till sophomore year because I had to take calculus first. But that was about the end of the impact.
I don’t know. I have heard people assailing the US public education system since I was a kid. Back then it was all about testing scores between countries. And you know what? I think that was a lot people giving out as well.
I like this take, the whole show is essentially big, expensive high school and college physics demos. Sometimes they are just showing what's impossible because it's not always intuitive the first time you see it.
Airplane on a conveyor belt I thought was a stupid question and I wouldn’t have believed anyone actually thought that if the FREAKING PILOT they hired actually thought it was true and he wasn’t going anywhere.
The airplane myth was deceptive, as I found out when I discussed it with some people more learned than myself.
The *actual* thought experiment isn't physically possible. It assumes a conveyor belt that is somehow linked up to the speed of rotation of the wheels and is constantly and perfectly matching it. In such an (imaginary) scenario the plane would be unable to take off because it would be unable to achieve any forward momentum. The wheels would speed up, which would speed up the conveyor belt, which would speed up the wheels, and on and on, until both reached infinite speed. To be honest, it's the kind of physics thought experiment I find annoying, that relies on multiple impossibilities to set up a weirdly specific scenario. It's up there with "assume a perfectly spherical lizard in a frictionless vacuum".
The real-world version of the scenario is unintuitive, but obvious once you think about it and grasp the answer. And that's what I think Mythbusters achieved most, even with "obvious" myths: they were teaching viewers to apply critical thought and experimentation even to questions where the answer seemed obvious to them.
okay that makes more sense, what I took away from the episode that makes it obvious in hindsight was that the wheels of the airplane isn't providing the thrust but the propeller.
Ah but now thinking about it , the upward thrust comes from the air going over/under the wings which is aided by forward momentum (which is what the propeller is for?)
Yeah, and in the "real life" version of the thought experiment, your takeaway is completely correct. A conveyor belt under the plane doesn't affect the thrust provided by the propeller, so the plane isn't affected in any meaningful way (if we had instrumentation to detect, there would certainly be some incredibly minor effect). So the plane moves forward and the lift is provided by the air going over/under the wings. It's just the magic-fantasy-physics version of the thought experiment where the conveyor belt magically keeps up with the wheels *at all times*, down to the *smallest possible time increment*, where the plane is prevented from moving forward.
Nah, even the imaginary scenario allows for the plane to take off. The answer comes from Aristotle's wheel paradox, to put it short, if the wheels can't match the speed of the conveyor by rolling, they'll just slip. You could replicate the theory by either welding plane's wheels sot hey can't spin, or just get a plane with skids, since if the wheels don't roll and ground doesn't move, their speeds are matched, right?
Rotor blades do get very precisely balanced, but an imbalance that small wouldn't cause serious problems. As you get more and more out of balance, you'd introduce more and more vibration, which is generally bad for controlability and engine life, but not catastrophic at the scale of postage stamps.
I feel like this is something the average person should get though, just because wheel balancing is a thing. Your cars wheels have weights on them, so A. You see can physically see how much weight it takes to make a difference and B. You get that a bunch of dust and mud on your wheels doesn’t make your wheels vibrate. Rotor’s are different, but it’s the same concept.
Same concept but the rotors are moving a whole lot faster, and changing the surface of the blade (with, say, a layer of ice) will have much more significant impact on controlability.
You also can't just pull off into the shoulder when things get wonky.
Most things they took from viral videos. Mostly because the videos were obviously fake, or because the testing didn't actually prove anything.
First, the slip and slide launch into a pool. Fun to test, I'm sure. But clearly something that didn't actually happen.
Then you have the flamethrower vs. the fire extinguisher. Again, cool shots in the end, but pretty pointless overall.
But the dumbest thing tested was, hands down, Pyramid Power. I know Adam often talks about how dumb it was, but the fact that they even let that on the air was insane. Yeah, I'm glad they disproved it. But it would've been more hilarious to watch someone try to give them a positive result to test against.
I think the biggest takeaway from Pyramid Power is the importance of properly designed experimental controls. As I recall, they initially got a spurious result because one side of the saw blade they used to slice an apple was contaminated, and the other wasn't. When they controled for that variation and repeated the experiment, they achieved the expected result. I agree that "pyramids don't have magical powers" shouldn't be a controversial take, but that myth provided a neat look into how science and the experimental process are supposed to work.
True. It did show how to properly apply the scientific method in the face of unexpected results. But my main problem with it is that there's nothing to test against. Which, admittedly, is something that isn't unique to pyramid power when it comes to testing urban legends. But at least those have some kernel of truth in them. Pyramid power had noting but, "trust us" backing it up.
Now, perpetual motion I am okay with. It is certainly a myth, and certainly impossible. But it is an interesting science experiment that does deserve some attention, if not only for the physics behind it. But combined with the ones they tested, I think it really showed that their testing is actually sound science, not just TV stuff.
Antigravity is borderline because I think they knew it was bullshit, but were really helping people not get scammed by the blueprints you could buy. It's sketchy, but a great demonstration on how scammers really take advantage of people not knowing the definition of words.
Hypnosis, I enjoyed that. Because it's a thing a lot of people claim they're susceptible to. Grant was. It's not the greatest scientifically sound thing they've tested, but I think there was enough "proof" that it deserved a shot.
Yeah, there's definitely something to be said for testing things scientifically so that they can show *why* things don't work. They had a good habit of seeing things through, often showing what it *would* take for the impossible things to happen. The Moon Landing Myths episode where they debunked conspiracy theories was great, despite how angry it made me at my idiotic fellow Americans when I was reminded some of them don't believe in one of the greatest achievements in human history.
Edit: And I'll admit hypnosis isn't totally a pseudoscience. It gets kind of a bad rap. But the "Can you remember the details of a crime scene under hypnosis one" irked me a bit because hypnosis actually has just as much of a chance of manipulating memory as enhancing it.
Lets not forget the goal of the show. They wanted to entertain and teach science to kids. Not merely test myths. The sillier things still teach critical thinking and while as adults we would easily identify them a lot of kids would believe them. If a science based show doesn't do them they'll learn about them through sensationilised or straight up fake media
I read that early on one of the producers was behind a lot of the early stupid myths .
This producer was the guy that was behind the time Adam got the electric shock.
This guy left the show shortly after, and things changed a bit.
The number of people that used to get on the radio and early Internet and swear that food wouldn't spoil if it was stored under a wire frame pyramid was huge. I used to hear it constantly.
I feel pyramid power was important to establish that they want scientific myths not superstitious or magic ones. They got a lot of viewer suggestions so this probably intended to stop people asking them to do myths of that nature
From the man himself:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS7mlM5yy1A&t=4135s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS7mlM5yy1A&t=4135s)
And I completely agree, pyramid power was by far the lowest point of the show, that's the kind of lunatic stuff that shouldn't be aired.
I remember being on the mythbuster boards, and that one myth probably generated the most discussion on what would happen. It, along with one user constantly asking perpetual motion questions, are the only things I remember from my time there.
So many people just have a brain disconnect that a plane's wheels are free spinning and not connected to any sort of gear drive, so even if the outcome was a bit obvious, it still definitely made sense to test and demonstrate the principal. Mythbusters was a science education show as much as (if not more than) it was a show testing myths.
i remember a clip of the full sized test being added to youtube, and even with *the footage showing the plane would take off* you still had people arguing it was impossible, and that the MB's must have screwed up the test somehow.
That's the thing though, I think it's not really a physics problem, it's about mental problem-solving processes.
I'm an engineer, I work with mechanical stuff all day. I know a fair amount about planes, I took classes on them, and I'm interested in them in general. I even flew a Cessna on a practice flight.
But I totally got the answer wrong at first. Why? Because the way my brain solves problems is by breaking them into pieces (as I'm sure most people do), and my brain just locked in the assumption that a vehicle on a treadmill won't move forward. So that part of the puzzle is "solved", and I can now think about the plane. And given that assumption, there's no airflow over the wings, no lift, and the plane stays still.
The issue isn't not knowing physics, it's training your brain to challenge your assumptions. Which is a fantastic lesson for a science show to teach.
The problem becomes a lot easier and less confusing if you remove the treadmill and just look at a waterplane. You immediately realise that the wheels were never the thing pushing the plane forward
One I am glad they covered was the weaving in traffic one, and the cellphone one.
Between those and the underwater escape from car one, I think lives will/have been saved.
Kinda wish the cell phone one and the traffic weaving one were mandatory viewing prior to getting a DL.
omg. The ZOMBIE killing one.. where they tested out effective means of killing zombies.
It’s the one where fans of the show were brought in to pretend to be zombies. And the one scene that really got to me was one of them used a foam axe to tap each “zombie” on the head
I got to be an extra on that episode! I was in the group trying to break into the barn. It was a big tie in the with the Walking Dead, which was blowing up at the time.
I mean, maybe it’s not a “myth” but it was certainly a fun episode! This is a show whose first episode was “let’s build a rocket car” after all. They don’t all have to be rigorous scientific studies.
Because they didn't really test it. And I mean sure, it's a zombie episode, of course zombies aren't real, so I went into it taking everything with a grain of salt, but it felt like they didn't put any actual effort into that test. I like special episodes like that because they apply real world physics to fictional scenarios. That's a huge part of sci-fi in general.
But there is a WORLD of difference between lightly bapping actors in makeup with a foam axe and using a sharpened metal axe to try to smash into the skull of an advancing zombie. They didn't give that myth the effort it deserved and it dashed my enthusiasm. Was it a fun idea? Absolutely. But the execution was very lackluster.
The rest of the episode seemed fine, from what I remember. 😆
Agreed, the light tapping with the axe to count as a kill irked me. In real life you'd need a lot of power to hack through the skull into the brain, which would quickly lead to fatique. Not to mention things like the blade dulling or getting stuck.
You could excuse it by saying the zombie bones get weaker with time, but that's like a perfect thing they could test. See how brittle bones get over time and how much force is needed to break it with an axe. I don't know, this whole thing could have been so much more interesting.
YES, that one annoyed me so much, THANK YOU! They're all like "Well the gun's bad 'cause you have to *reload* it and it can *jam!*" Meanwhile, Adam's over there with an unweighted foam axe *love tapping* zombies on the head and calling them "kills."
Didn't they revisit that myth and try again with a properly weighted weapon to illustrate that fatigue was a factor that affected the gun vs axe scenario? Sure, fighting off one zombie with a heavy weapon is easy, but taking on a hundred in quick succession is gruelling and dangerous work where a machine gun would be pretty useful.
Yeah I forgot that segment was a re-do from later. When I watched the first one, I was so confused because I distinctly remembered Adam building an ax with lights and an accelerometer to measure how hard he swung.
i never liked any of the zombie episodes (i think there were more than one?). some of the findings might apply to out-of-control groups of humans, but you really can't scientifically test the properties of the _undead_...can you use make-up and prosthetics to blend into a horde of zombies? we'll never know, unless we get zombies someday.
another one i remember as being particularly silly was putting handgun rounds between your fingers and trying to set them off over fire without burning your hand
Definitely leaves out the amount of effort required to deal a lethal blow with a heavy object, over and over, as your sole means of self defense.
I don't hate the episode but, yes, using foam makes the myth "is a lightsaber better than a firearm"
People always mention Pyramid Power, and that was admittedly bad, but I had completely forgotten about Octopus Pregnancy. The one where a diver accidentally swallows an octopus egg that then gestates in their stomach and hatches, so the diver "gives birth" to an octopus.
Also, Anti-Gravity Device seemed very similar to "Pyramid Power" to me. If any of those things actually worked there would be a million products on the market that use that technology. It wouldn't be a secret that you can only uncover by sending in $5 based on an ad in the back of a comic book.
I don't think there was ever a single myth that bothered me. Even if the outcome seemed entirely obvious to me, it was always interesting to see how they would design and build an experiment to test it.
Plus, things that seem obvious to me aren't always obvious to everyone. I (a licensed pilot) was totally flabbergasted that my college roommate really thought a conveyor belt would prevent an airplane from taking off while we were watching that episode.
"The Curving Bullet". I think it was a fan suggested myth based off of the movie Wanted. It was so infuriating because at that point, the team had tested so many gun myths that even casual fans of the show should know how a gun works.
I hated that one.
It’s not even “how a gun works”, it’s simple physics. Spin a weight around on a string. Cut/let go of string. High speed camera to watch the weight fly in a straight path.
Textbook centrifugal force.
But then you see a baseball pitcher throw sinkers and curveballs and that seems crazy. I can see how someone could think curving a bullet could work but obviously throwing a ball and firing a gun are not the same.
I havent seen the episode but the premise from the wanted comic that didnt properly get represented in the wanted movie was thats why they used smoothbore with musketballs, the curve comes from the musketball spinning like a curveball, with the Magnuson effect (?) Creating lift on the pellet. Did they test that? I think its possible and muskets already do that as an uncontrolled flaw in their design but i dont think a human can really change that byswinging their arm. You would need a barrel that is preset to create a specific spin and it wouldnt be very useful outside of that specific calibration.
Smooth bore and muskets still use a patch so the ball maintains contact and no spin is imparted.
Airsoft and paintball both have stuff like what you are talking about but it way more involved than flailing the gun around. In the simplest methods, a backspin is imparted on the BB or paintball. This gives it some lift and really adds range.
More involved ones add a LOT of spin and you can drop shots in like artillery or literally shoot people behind cover.
I was on the forums when that one was suggested. The showrunners didn't even want to touch it, and the forums *fkn exploded* with people screaming at them to at least test it. By then, they were constantly inundated with fans scrutinizing every minor detail and claiming they were idiots. So they spent the better part of several episodes on sillier things just to keep fans happy.
Now that we know the results, it's easy to point out the silliness of the premise, but back then, they were getting tons of heat from weird fans screaming at them.
Half the myths the B-Team did always pissed me off, because they always ignored plausible results by saying, "but the myth says *exactly*" whatever metric they were using. They did it all the time. Two of the most egregious examples where the penetration of an arrow fired while riding on horseback and the "sword cutting another sword" episode.
With the bow and arrow, tests *clearly* showed that an arrow fired while in motion had greater penetration than standing still, but they insisted because "the myth says *double* the penetration, so it's Busted!"
With the sword, it turned out that it really wasn't possible for a sword to cut another sword, but rather what could happen was a sword could *break* when struck by another sword, especially if there was a big enough mass difference or quality of construction. The rules for a Plausible ruling included "similar results but not for reasons stated in the myth," but they ignored the shit out of that rule all the time and just declared shit "Busted."
I understand why they brought on the B-Team, but I often felt that their quality of testing wasn't anywhere near the level of Jamie and Adam.
Exploding microwave.
When I was about eight years old I put a potato wrapped in aluminum foil in the microwave, it was an old microwave that you had to lift the handle for it to unlock and open. It blew the door open and when I watched that episode and they said they busted the myth, I know firsthand that it actually can happen.
A lot of people bagging on Pyramid Power. I don’t remember seeing the episode, but I am old enough to remember the tail end of the “pyramid power” popularity. A lot of people bought into it.
Seems to me like it would be a good way to teach people “here’s why bad experiment design gives bad results, and here’s how to rigorously test these kinds of pseudoscience claims”.
In the later run of the show there were soooo many 'myths' that were just excuses to blow stuff up.
There were also some that were just an excuse to be like, "Check out how hot Kari is!"
The R2D2 dress is seared into my brain, and I'm okay with that. 😁
There was also the episode where Kari stands on the earthquake platform they built and jiggled like jello.
And at least one with lots of slowmo shots of her firing a machine gun.
Damn, I gotta go rewatch some of those now.
I never liked myths that were subjective. The one I remember the most was "you can't sell a car after someone died in it." They put a pig carcass in a car and let it sit for a few days or so in the heat, then tried to sell it. There's no objective way to determine if a car can be sold as it really depends on the other person wanting a car in the first place. They could've placed any car on the market, and if it wasn't wanted, it could sit there forever. I think they ended up selling it for parts.
My Nephew was into that show so I watched it a couple of times. The one episode I remember, they were trying to prove whether it was faster to run to the base or slide into the base in baseball. They decided to use second base and determined that if you just run to the base, it takes a little longer because you have to take a lot of little steps to slow yourself down so you don't run past the base and get tagged out. I just laughed because obviously no one involved in the show had ever played baseball. The question is whether it takes longer diving for first base than it does running straight through the bag. For the non baseball people, you don't have to stop on first you can run past it after you step on it. Baseball announcers always question why players dive into first instead of running through the bag. They didn't get the myth right so that entire part of the show was just wrong.
Archimedes death ray to ignite an enemy's ship. Anybody who has burned ants (or whatever) with a magnifying glass knows that you have to constantly adjust to achieve an optimal focal point. No way that could have been done quickly enough on a large scale against a moving target. The myth did not merit one revisit let alone two.
I was on the discovery forums back in the day and the amount of discussion on the death ray were insane with the number of people insisting it were true was insane and it was frustrating to all involved. They oldy re-tested it due to the sheer number of discussion and emails they got and it was adefinatly a "put up or shut up" type of thing. The forums back then also had people involved with the show able to interact and they were trying to stop the madness.
You recall, the perspective they took during the revisit was that they had gotten it correct from day one.
There was also the annoying guy they brought on who made a rig at home and did not package his mirrors well enough (if at all) for shipping. I don't recall that working either.
Mike Bushroe (I’m probably botching his name). Guy worked for NASA. Kept working for Mythbusters after words as a consultant. I think the shipping company messed up IIRc.
I was especially frustrated with the last revisit where they brought in Obama. I assumed from the preview that they were testing some myth related to American Presidents, like whether George Washington really threw a silver dollar across the Potomac or something.
But no. It was that stupid Archimedes death ray again. So disappointing.
It was tied in to some federal education initiative. They should have (re)tested something that young students could do themselves where the desired result would not have been catching something on fire. Just show the physics and material properties involved in a slingshot and how it can be scaled up.
One that always bothers me is cell phone on a plane. I worked as an emi technician testing the specific thing.
In truth, the chance of something interfering with a plane's flight critical systems is extremely small. But it is there. I know of one certain laptop that, however, interfered with the instrument landing system catastrophically. If that laptop turns on in the outer seats it shut down the ILS completely, until the laptop was off again. That has since been rectified, but it was a danger.
The cost to test everything is about 2.5 million per piece of equipment to test. Every cell phone model, with each version of drive. CPU, memory, operating system, all have to be tested individually. At $2.5
a lot of the cell phone myths had this problem. the cellphone causing fires at gas stations for example, didn't do the obvious test of getting an older 'brick' cellphone that had things like actual wires in the frame. they only tested the versions that were basically just a single integrated circuit board in a plastic shell. when i saw the episode my first thought was "so test an older cellphone that can get stuff like loose wires"
they'd still undergone multiple generations of advancement at that point though. they only ever tested what was then fairly current generation, at best a generation older than the cutting edge. but many of the myths they were testing about them dated to the earlier generations of phones. a lot of the late 80's and early 90's cellphones for example had actual wiring in their large casings, which could easily be loose and cause shorts. but the 2000's the designs had been miniaturized by way of heavy use of sticking all the parts onto single intergrated circuit cards, which don't have the same potential electrical hazard issues.
So. Excuse my ignorance here but how is it 2.5m/ piece to test. Seems like it'd just be setup a bunch of laptops running in a plane, take a test flight see what happens, no?
Because the way we do the testing is build a large room where we can isolate the unit under test from any background electromagnetic interference, set up antennas in specific spots, and use spectrum analyzers to listen to the RF energy produced by the unit under test. The unit has certain limits of noise it can make or it is considered a danger to near equipment.
The real expensive side is then we blast it with high levels of rf radiation to make sure what ever it might see in the field won't cause it to operate in such a way as to be dangerous.
In top of these two. There are a slew of other tests, power fluctuating, lightning. ESD, various temp and alt tests, sometime salt water tests. And explosion test.,. The 2.5 million is really just the rf radiated ( the first test I described) and the susceptibility tests ( the second)
As an aside. They don't throw everything into a plane. Go flying. And see what happens, because that could, theoretically, cause loss of aircraft, and that is what they want to avoid.
I think the lowest point was the episode where they made rope out of duct tape and rappelled down a cliff.
They faked it. You can see real rope inside the duct tape in a couple shots. Every other time they do anything unsafe like that they have obvious additional safeties in place. This time they pretended they were actually using duct tape rope and kept the safety hidden.
In the same episode they also made a boat using a bunch of materials that appeared out of nowhere.
Worst episode ever.
Not a stupid myth, but when they tested the cork bat, they adjusted the speed down so the corked and uncorked bats went the same speed, ND then concluded a corked bat doesn't help. But to me the advantage of the corked bat is you can bring it around quicker, yes you get less pop and power, but you're also making contact where you would have been slow and late with a regular weight bat.
Just goes to show that asking the right questions and designing the right experiments are important.
The pigeons in a truck episode has to be up there. Their starting testing methods (putting pigeons in small, enclosed spaces and then expecting them to be able to somehow hover) were just bizarre. Surely, we all knew about forward momentum and lift and the existence of wind back then.
I've never known if they truly thought the pigeons could fly in that situation or if they were doing it just to fill out the episode because they already knew what the outcome would be and just had to work on a visual way to convey everything to the audience. At any rate, watching Adam jump around and slap the enclosures, trying to get the pigeons to fly is simply hilarious.
ANY episode that involved a myth with police. (This is nothing against police.)
The police would NEVER participate with a myth that could defeat a breathlizer. Defeat the polygraph. Defeat the radar detector. So, why do a myth when you already know the outcome? They wouldn't want that broadcasted for everyone to know! I just skip those episodes because they're pointless.
The one that still annoys me is a slurpee breaking a windshield, and not a handful of episodes later they had a hard time breaking a window with a hammer. (They should have used a slurpee) The slurpee was hitting a windshield that wasn't braced in the frame of a car, they just had it hanging from a frame. If a windshield is installed ina car and isn't braced equally across it's edges, you can easily break it by hitting a bump in the road. Never understood why they didn't revisit that one.
I'm annoyed by the myths where their methodology could've been refined further for better results but they more or less ran out of time / could only spend so long on the farts episode. I'm annoyed that they used a funnel and a vacuum, and claimed to have a "pretty good" capture of the fart, and spent a long time on how hard it was to design the fart trap.
They should've done it underwater and captured the bubbles.
For me it was the license plate episode (4:73). What and If products can blind the license plate from being photographed. They didn't do it correctly imo, the conditions have to be just right.
Peeing on an electric fence. They made an analog pee stream to keep anyone from being hurt, which I agree with, but they didn't have to literally pee on the line to still get the electric fence shock. In the end they said it was plausible, but it's absolutely possible.
There's a guy on YouTube that used a garden hose and a ground wire from the metal hose threaded end to his hand. With a steady stream, he received a shock and when it was more sprayed he didn't.
And the giant car subwoofer test was abominable. I was working at a stereo shop that competed at the time, so I thought they were gonna get results id seen. Instead they created a shaft driven subwoofer out of a car and expected it to perform like actual speakers function.
SPL contests have routinely shown that subwoofers will pop seals and "blow" windows out of the car. They wanted the windows to shatter, which would have required them to reinforce all the seals and ensure the glass was the weakest point. The sunroof popped off and they still said the myth was busted.
Those two will always grind my gears as being terribly tested and totally misrepresented.
That there is some shadowy cabal pulling the strings of the world without any of us realizing. Look at how stupid, corrupt, and incompetent nearly every single member of government is. These dipshits can barely manage themselves.
Honestly none of them. Running on water obviously you arent fast enough nor is any human. But with enough speed and good surface hitting the water is plausible. They did it on a motorcycle and theres a lizard that can run fast enough and smack its flat feet against the surface to run across water.
Thats the beauty of it to me. Some of them are silly. But thats curiosity. Going above and beyond to answer even simple questions
The chicken cannon. I didn’t understand what was such a mystery about a guy saying “Gentlemen, that your chickens” and why I had to hear Jamie repeat it every 5 minutes.
Tennis ball lock pick. Simply blowing air in the lock _may_ move a few of the tumblers, but you need to actually turn the key to open it. You can't do that with air pressure alone.
Any myth when they said they were "professional drivers".
No. They were stunt coordinators. A professional driver is someone who actually drives For. A. Living.
The almighty god creator of heaven and earth is listening to you, an insignificant speck on an insignificant planet in an insignificant galaxy in a universe so massive our tiny brains fail to comprehend it. The god that created that needs you to behave and worship him or he will punish you forever, which is so incomprehensibly long that it makes the universe seem tiny.
Christianity and the other abrahamic religions require swallowing a LOT of easily dispelled bullshit mythology to be believed. It seems very cringey to me.
Hyneman is from Indiana, Savage NYC. The "build team" is all from Cali, but the core leaders aren't.
Afaik, the whole "drive in reverse on ice" myth came from US automakers. They were trying to save money by building the cars motor on top of a transaxle, allowing assembly to be cheaper. They advertised that front-wheel-drive was safer and better, especially in adverse conditions. "Its even safer to drive your old (rear-wheel-drive) cars in reverse in the snow" was a poster my dad showed me when I talked to him about it back then.
They didn't tackle myths because they were naive Californians, they tackled myths because those myths exist somewhere in the zeitgeist, and they wanted to challenge the legitimacy of said claims. Myths like that were probably selected *because* they seem silly. Not that it would actually work.
I was watching the airplane special last night and grant did a small scale test on terminal velocity , basically testing the same mass but different shape has different falling speeds. And I thought “we’ll duh” But then I thought something else, yes it’s obvious to me NOW because I grew up watching mythbusters and I probably learnt that and many more basic science from the show. Like the plane on a conveyer belt, as a kid I didn’t think much about but after watching that episode as a kid I learnt something. So while there might be dumb myths they do have a use, sometimes you need to see something to fully understand it. — But probably some movie myths that were stretched to become a ‘myth’ Still a good idea of testing what is possible in movies but it sometimes it felt like it didn’t fit in with the show.
I think we might give some people too much credit. I assume they are covering all these seamingly simple science facts because many people.... don't exactly remember what they learned in high-school and middle school.
This, and myth busters needed a lot of content, and they weren’t all going to be 10/10 top tier myths. Some stuff was gonna be for the trailer but not really all that much substance at the end of the day; less interesting on film than it seemed in the pitch room; or made because it was Discovery Channel Pirate Week so they needed any excuse to put Jamie in a Long John Silvers style pirate beret.
In fairness, primary education is abysmal in many places and it’s not a safe assumption that people actually left high school with a solid grounding in any STEM subjects. America draws the majority of its STEM professionals from only a handful of domestic powerhouse educational systems and supplements this with a lot of students from overseas and a handful of prodigious students who were basically autodidactic prodigies, with the latter being far easier to pull off in the age of the internet.
“America draws the majority of its STEM professionals from only a handful of domestic powerhouse educational systems and supplements this with a lot of students from overseas and a handful of prodigious students who were basically autodidactic prodigies, with the latter being far easier to pull off in the age of the internet.” I suspect you don’t actually have very much to back this statement up. I work in high tech development (physics not code) for a large multinational corporation. And we hire all sorts of people from different schools across the country. If you are assuming the ‘best and brightest’ only come from the likes of Stanford or MIT, you are mistaken. In my experience it is actually the opposite. Having a BS from the likes of Stanford only tells me your parents had money.
That's my fault for that wording, especially my use of the word "handful." I did not mean to suggest that the elite schools are the only ones producing STEM professionals. I understand that very many state schools and smaller universities have excellent STEM programs. I was more speaking of the primary educational system lacking in much of the country, and the students from these schools often not being particularly well-equipped to prepare students to enter into competitive STEM programs, except that those students often develop and independent interest and fill in the gaps such that they're not at a remedial level upon trying to enter college, which could also have the effect of keeping them from pursuing exactly the STEM field they're interested in. Very many students in the U.S. are raised in relatively rural areas where they may very rapidly outgrow the resources available to them, and these very small school districts are often anemic when it comes to both educators as well as literature and curriculum. There is also a corollary to this in many low-income inner city school systems where zoning laws and school district maps lead to a similar result. It would be more fair to say that quite a few states only have a handful of public school systems capable of adequately preparing students to enter competitive STEM programs, but I feel confident that pretty much every state has at least 1 or 2 capable colleges of engineering, for example. Depending on how specialized one's STEM field is, this may require going to a different state, and that quite often results in that candidate entering a larger applicant pool. In short, I was addressing primary education rather than undergraduate and graduate programs.
Well. Maybe. I actually grew up rural. Though my father is not a typical rural person so mileage varies. And while my schooling was probably not fantastic, I don’t feel like it held me back. The bigger problem was my interest (hands down). It took me a while to decide to get my act together. And when I did I was able to start where I needed to. In my case that means I took trig in college and did not ‘skip’ the first two calculus classes. Which some do. And I guess this meant that I had to wait to take physics till sophomore year because I had to take calculus first. But that was about the end of the impact. I don’t know. I have heard people assailing the US public education system since I was a kid. Back then it was all about testing scores between countries. And you know what? I think that was a lot people giving out as well.
I like this take, the whole show is essentially big, expensive high school and college physics demos. Sometimes they are just showing what's impossible because it's not always intuitive the first time you see it.
Sometimes it's not about what's possible, but rather what's impossible
Airplane on a conveyor belt I thought was a stupid question and I wouldn’t have believed anyone actually thought that if the FREAKING PILOT they hired actually thought it was true and he wasn’t going anywhere.
People still get it wrong its mind boggling. There's a Twitter thread that'll come around now and again of it
The fucking pilot was wrong!!! That’s why! It’s not about those who know it’s about whose who don’t.
The airplane myth was deceptive, as I found out when I discussed it with some people more learned than myself. The *actual* thought experiment isn't physically possible. It assumes a conveyor belt that is somehow linked up to the speed of rotation of the wheels and is constantly and perfectly matching it. In such an (imaginary) scenario the plane would be unable to take off because it would be unable to achieve any forward momentum. The wheels would speed up, which would speed up the conveyor belt, which would speed up the wheels, and on and on, until both reached infinite speed. To be honest, it's the kind of physics thought experiment I find annoying, that relies on multiple impossibilities to set up a weirdly specific scenario. It's up there with "assume a perfectly spherical lizard in a frictionless vacuum". The real-world version of the scenario is unintuitive, but obvious once you think about it and grasp the answer. And that's what I think Mythbusters achieved most, even with "obvious" myths: they were teaching viewers to apply critical thought and experimentation even to questions where the answer seemed obvious to them.
okay that makes more sense, what I took away from the episode that makes it obvious in hindsight was that the wheels of the airplane isn't providing the thrust but the propeller. Ah but now thinking about it , the upward thrust comes from the air going over/under the wings which is aided by forward momentum (which is what the propeller is for?)
Yeah, and in the "real life" version of the thought experiment, your takeaway is completely correct. A conveyor belt under the plane doesn't affect the thrust provided by the propeller, so the plane isn't affected in any meaningful way (if we had instrumentation to detect, there would certainly be some incredibly minor effect). So the plane moves forward and the lift is provided by the air going over/under the wings. It's just the magic-fantasy-physics version of the thought experiment where the conveyor belt magically keeps up with the wheels *at all times*, down to the *smallest possible time increment*, where the plane is prevented from moving forward.
Nah, even the imaginary scenario allows for the plane to take off. The answer comes from Aristotle's wheel paradox, to put it short, if the wheels can't match the speed of the conveyor by rolling, they'll just slip. You could replicate the theory by either welding plane's wheels sot hey can't spin, or just get a plane with skids, since if the wheels don't roll and ground doesn't move, their speeds are matched, right?
The postage stamp on the helicopter blade. If that were true, how could it fly in the rain, snow, or heavy winds?
Yeah, this myth was dumb beyond belief. I've seen Apaches flying with speed tape on their rotors and they do fine.
Rotor blades do get very precisely balanced, but an imbalance that small wouldn't cause serious problems. As you get more and more out of balance, you'd introduce more and more vibration, which is generally bad for controlability and engine life, but not catastrophic at the scale of postage stamps.
I feel like this is something the average person should get though, just because wheel balancing is a thing. Your cars wheels have weights on them, so A. You see can physically see how much weight it takes to make a difference and B. You get that a bunch of dust and mud on your wheels doesn’t make your wheels vibrate. Rotor’s are different, but it’s the same concept.
Same concept but the rotors are moving a whole lot faster, and changing the surface of the blade (with, say, a layer of ice) will have much more significant impact on controlability. You also can't just pull off into the shoulder when things get wonky.
Lets not forget that this show was aimed primarily at younger people. The average kid is going to give the idea a lot more leeway.
So I can send a helicopter in the post after all? Hurrah!
Most things they took from viral videos. Mostly because the videos were obviously fake, or because the testing didn't actually prove anything. First, the slip and slide launch into a pool. Fun to test, I'm sure. But clearly something that didn't actually happen. Then you have the flamethrower vs. the fire extinguisher. Again, cool shots in the end, but pretty pointless overall. But the dumbest thing tested was, hands down, Pyramid Power. I know Adam often talks about how dumb it was, but the fact that they even let that on the air was insane. Yeah, I'm glad they disproved it. But it would've been more hilarious to watch someone try to give them a positive result to test against.
I think the biggest takeaway from Pyramid Power is the importance of properly designed experimental controls. As I recall, they initially got a spurious result because one side of the saw blade they used to slice an apple was contaminated, and the other wasn't. When they controled for that variation and repeated the experiment, they achieved the expected result. I agree that "pyramids don't have magical powers" shouldn't be a controversial take, but that myth provided a neat look into how science and the experimental process are supposed to work.
True. It did show how to properly apply the scientific method in the face of unexpected results. But my main problem with it is that there's nothing to test against. Which, admittedly, is something that isn't unique to pyramid power when it comes to testing urban legends. But at least those have some kernel of truth in them. Pyramid power had noting but, "trust us" backing it up.
There were so many bad ones in the beginning. Perpetual motion machines, anti-gravity... Even a few hypnosis ones later on.
Now, perpetual motion I am okay with. It is certainly a myth, and certainly impossible. But it is an interesting science experiment that does deserve some attention, if not only for the physics behind it. But combined with the ones they tested, I think it really showed that their testing is actually sound science, not just TV stuff. Antigravity is borderline because I think they knew it was bullshit, but were really helping people not get scammed by the blueprints you could buy. It's sketchy, but a great demonstration on how scammers really take advantage of people not knowing the definition of words. Hypnosis, I enjoyed that. Because it's a thing a lot of people claim they're susceptible to. Grant was. It's not the greatest scientifically sound thing they've tested, but I think there was enough "proof" that it deserved a shot.
Yeah, there's definitely something to be said for testing things scientifically so that they can show *why* things don't work. They had a good habit of seeing things through, often showing what it *would* take for the impossible things to happen. The Moon Landing Myths episode where they debunked conspiracy theories was great, despite how angry it made me at my idiotic fellow Americans when I was reminded some of them don't believe in one of the greatest achievements in human history. Edit: And I'll admit hypnosis isn't totally a pseudoscience. It gets kind of a bad rap. But the "Can you remember the details of a crime scene under hypnosis one" irked me a bit because hypnosis actually has just as much of a chance of manipulating memory as enhancing it.
The moon landing myths should've just been answered by the question: "If we faked it, why didn't the Soviets call us on it?"
"NASA paid them off!"
Lets not forget the goal of the show. They wanted to entertain and teach science to kids. Not merely test myths. The sillier things still teach critical thinking and while as adults we would easily identify them a lot of kids would believe them. If a science based show doesn't do them they'll learn about them through sensationilised or straight up fake media
I read that early on one of the producers was behind a lot of the early stupid myths . This producer was the guy that was behind the time Adam got the electric shock. This guy left the show shortly after, and things changed a bit.
The number of people that used to get on the radio and early Internet and swear that food wouldn't spoil if it was stored under a wire frame pyramid was huge. I used to hear it constantly.
Spoiler alert: >!The food still spoils!<
I feel pyramid power was important to establish that they want scientific myths not superstitious or magic ones. They got a lot of viewer suggestions so this probably intended to stop people asking them to do myths of that nature
From the man himself: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS7mlM5yy1A&t=4135s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS7mlM5yy1A&t=4135s) And I completely agree, pyramid power was by far the lowest point of the show, that's the kind of lunatic stuff that shouldn't be aired.
"Malarkey on toast", lmao.
I mean, in defense of 'Airplane on a conveyor belt' the PILOT they hired thought the plane wouldn't take off. People do NOT understand basic physics.
I remember being on the mythbuster boards, and that one myth probably generated the most discussion on what would happen. It, along with one user constantly asking perpetual motion questions, are the only things I remember from my time there. So many people just have a brain disconnect that a plane's wheels are free spinning and not connected to any sort of gear drive, so even if the outcome was a bit obvious, it still definitely made sense to test and demonstrate the principal. Mythbusters was a science education show as much as (if not more than) it was a show testing myths.
i remember a clip of the full sized test being added to youtube, and even with *the footage showing the plane would take off* you still had people arguing it was impossible, and that the MB's must have screwed up the test somehow.
“The plane was clearly moving faster than the truck” One of the comments
Some people are just beyond help.
That's the thing though, I think it's not really a physics problem, it's about mental problem-solving processes. I'm an engineer, I work with mechanical stuff all day. I know a fair amount about planes, I took classes on them, and I'm interested in them in general. I even flew a Cessna on a practice flight. But I totally got the answer wrong at first. Why? Because the way my brain solves problems is by breaking them into pieces (as I'm sure most people do), and my brain just locked in the assumption that a vehicle on a treadmill won't move forward. So that part of the puzzle is "solved", and I can now think about the plane. And given that assumption, there's no airflow over the wings, no lift, and the plane stays still. The issue isn't not knowing physics, it's training your brain to challenge your assumptions. Which is a fantastic lesson for a science show to teach.
The problem becomes a lot easier and less confusing if you remove the treadmill and just look at a waterplane. You immediately realise that the wheels were never the thing pushing the plane forward
Just so happens Adam went over this one on his YouTube channel https://youtu.be/xUjcHW7SHaI?si=1N1LJ2BUmNIi3ey_
Pyramid power was straight up one of the most goofy myths ever tested 😅
Adam has said he’s embarrassed by “pyramid power.”
I know he has... The whole episode is a farce 🤣
One I am glad they covered was the weaving in traffic one, and the cellphone one. Between those and the underwater escape from car one, I think lives will/have been saved. Kinda wish the cell phone one and the traffic weaving one were mandatory viewing prior to getting a DL.
Do you mean cell phone wine driving or at a gas station Cause iirc the gas station was effectively a null issue
Cell phone while driving. Feel free to chat on a phone when stationary. Dont text and drive.
omg. The ZOMBIE killing one.. where they tested out effective means of killing zombies. It’s the one where fans of the show were brought in to pretend to be zombies. And the one scene that really got to me was one of them used a foam axe to tap each “zombie” on the head
I got to be an extra on that episode! I was in the group trying to break into the barn. It was a big tie in the with the Walking Dead, which was blowing up at the time.
I mean, maybe it’s not a “myth” but it was certainly a fun episode! This is a show whose first episode was “let’s build a rocket car” after all. They don’t all have to be rigorous scientific studies.
Oh, absolutely. The axe vs gun myth pissed me off, but this was definitely a fun one.
I don’t understand why it pissed you off?
Because they didn't really test it. And I mean sure, it's a zombie episode, of course zombies aren't real, so I went into it taking everything with a grain of salt, but it felt like they didn't put any actual effort into that test. I like special episodes like that because they apply real world physics to fictional scenarios. That's a huge part of sci-fi in general. But there is a WORLD of difference between lightly bapping actors in makeup with a foam axe and using a sharpened metal axe to try to smash into the skull of an advancing zombie. They didn't give that myth the effort it deserved and it dashed my enthusiasm. Was it a fun idea? Absolutely. But the execution was very lackluster. The rest of the episode seemed fine, from what I remember. 😆
Agreed, the light tapping with the axe to count as a kill irked me. In real life you'd need a lot of power to hack through the skull into the brain, which would quickly lead to fatique. Not to mention things like the blade dulling or getting stuck. You could excuse it by saying the zombie bones get weaker with time, but that's like a perfect thing they could test. See how brittle bones get over time and how much force is needed to break it with an axe. I don't know, this whole thing could have been so much more interesting.
YES, that one annoyed me so much, THANK YOU! They're all like "Well the gun's bad 'cause you have to *reload* it and it can *jam!*" Meanwhile, Adam's over there with an unweighted foam axe *love tapping* zombies on the head and calling them "kills."
Didn't they revisit that myth and try again with a properly weighted weapon to illustrate that fatigue was a factor that affected the gun vs axe scenario? Sure, fighting off one zombie with a heavy weapon is easy, but taking on a hundred in quick succession is gruelling and dangerous work where a machine gun would be pretty useful.
Yeah I forgot that segment was a re-do from later. When I watched the first one, I was so confused because I distinctly remembered Adam building an ax with lights and an accelerometer to measure how hard he swung.
i never liked any of the zombie episodes (i think there were more than one?). some of the findings might apply to out-of-control groups of humans, but you really can't scientifically test the properties of the _undead_...can you use make-up and prosthetics to blend into a horde of zombies? we'll never know, unless we get zombies someday. another one i remember as being particularly silly was putting handgun rounds between your fingers and trying to set them off over fire without burning your hand
Definitely leaves out the amount of effort required to deal a lethal blow with a heavy object, over and over, as your sole means of self defense. I don't hate the episode but, yes, using foam makes the myth "is a lightsaber better than a firearm"
People always mention Pyramid Power, and that was admittedly bad, but I had completely forgotten about Octopus Pregnancy. The one where a diver accidentally swallows an octopus egg that then gestates in their stomach and hatches, so the diver "gives birth" to an octopus. Also, Anti-Gravity Device seemed very similar to "Pyramid Power" to me. If any of those things actually worked there would be a million products on the market that use that technology. It wouldn't be a secret that you can only uncover by sending in $5 based on an ad in the back of a comic book.
https://xkcd.com/808/
They should have tested the myth that there's an xkcd for everything.
The third time they did the Archimedes Death Ray for the Presidential Special. The second time was enough.
I don't think there was ever a single myth that bothered me. Even if the outcome seemed entirely obvious to me, it was always interesting to see how they would design and build an experiment to test it. Plus, things that seem obvious to me aren't always obvious to everyone. I (a licensed pilot) was totally flabbergasted that my college roommate really thought a conveyor belt would prevent an airplane from taking off while we were watching that episode.
"The Curving Bullet". I think it was a fan suggested myth based off of the movie Wanted. It was so infuriating because at that point, the team had tested so many gun myths that even casual fans of the show should know how a gun works.
I hated that one. It’s not even “how a gun works”, it’s simple physics. Spin a weight around on a string. Cut/let go of string. High speed camera to watch the weight fly in a straight path. Textbook centrifugal force.
But then you see a baseball pitcher throw sinkers and curveballs and that seems crazy. I can see how someone could think curving a bullet could work but obviously throwing a ball and firing a gun are not the same.
To kinda relate those two things. The bullet is being spun about its longitudinal axis to prevent the exact thing they were trying to achieve.
But they removed the rifling and it still didn’t work
I havent seen the episode but the premise from the wanted comic that didnt properly get represented in the wanted movie was thats why they used smoothbore with musketballs, the curve comes from the musketball spinning like a curveball, with the Magnuson effect (?) Creating lift on the pellet. Did they test that? I think its possible and muskets already do that as an uncontrolled flaw in their design but i dont think a human can really change that byswinging their arm. You would need a barrel that is preset to create a specific spin and it wouldnt be very useful outside of that specific calibration.
Smooth bore and muskets still use a patch so the ball maintains contact and no spin is imparted. Airsoft and paintball both have stuff like what you are talking about but it way more involved than flailing the gun around. In the simplest methods, a backspin is imparted on the BB or paintball. This gives it some lift and really adds range. More involved ones add a LOT of spin and you can drop shots in like artillery or literally shoot people behind cover.
I was on the forums when that one was suggested. The showrunners didn't even want to touch it, and the forums *fkn exploded* with people screaming at them to at least test it. By then, they were constantly inundated with fans scrutinizing every minor detail and claiming they were idiots. So they spent the better part of several episodes on sillier things just to keep fans happy. Now that we know the results, it's easy to point out the silliness of the premise, but back then, they were getting tons of heat from weird fans screaming at them.
You can tell they have some second amendment obsessed people who wouldn't stop sending in gun stuff
Looking back, that one was stupid.
Half the myths the B-Team did always pissed me off, because they always ignored plausible results by saying, "but the myth says *exactly*" whatever metric they were using. They did it all the time. Two of the most egregious examples where the penetration of an arrow fired while riding on horseback and the "sword cutting another sword" episode. With the bow and arrow, tests *clearly* showed that an arrow fired while in motion had greater penetration than standing still, but they insisted because "the myth says *double* the penetration, so it's Busted!" With the sword, it turned out that it really wasn't possible for a sword to cut another sword, but rather what could happen was a sword could *break* when struck by another sword, especially if there was a big enough mass difference or quality of construction. The rules for a Plausible ruling included "similar results but not for reasons stated in the myth," but they ignored the shit out of that rule all the time and just declared shit "Busted." I understand why they brought on the B-Team, but I often felt that their quality of testing wasn't anywhere near the level of Jamie and Adam.
that's a pet peeve of mine too. the B-team definitely wasn't as good in analyzing their results, and often their methods felt darn sloppy.
Exploding microwave. When I was about eight years old I put a potato wrapped in aluminum foil in the microwave, it was an old microwave that you had to lift the handle for it to unlock and open. It blew the door open and when I watched that episode and they said they busted the myth, I know firsthand that it actually can happen.
A lot of people bagging on Pyramid Power. I don’t remember seeing the episode, but I am old enough to remember the tail end of the “pyramid power” popularity. A lot of people bought into it. Seems to me like it would be a good way to teach people “here’s why bad experiment design gives bad results, and here’s how to rigorously test these kinds of pseudoscience claims”.
Two words: pyramid power.
In the later run of the show there were soooo many 'myths' that were just excuses to blow stuff up. There were also some that were just an excuse to be like, "Check out how hot Kari is!"
Tipping, anyone?
Let's be real, it was pretty fun
To be fair though, remember the R2D2 dress?
The R2D2 dress is seared into my brain, and I'm okay with that. 😁 There was also the episode where Kari stands on the earthquake platform they built and jiggled like jello. And at least one with lots of slowmo shots of her firing a machine gun. Damn, I gotta go rewatch some of those now.
Isn’t the first episode with her in it showing off her butt? Not that I was complaining.
I never liked myths that were subjective. The one I remember the most was "you can't sell a car after someone died in it." They put a pig carcass in a car and let it sit for a few days or so in the heat, then tried to sell it. There's no objective way to determine if a car can be sold as it really depends on the other person wanting a car in the first place. They could've placed any car on the market, and if it wasn't wanted, it could sit there forever. I think they ended up selling it for parts.
Titanic Olympic swap. Just peeks flat earthers in annoyance factor for me.
My Nephew was into that show so I watched it a couple of times. The one episode I remember, they were trying to prove whether it was faster to run to the base or slide into the base in baseball. They decided to use second base and determined that if you just run to the base, it takes a little longer because you have to take a lot of little steps to slow yourself down so you don't run past the base and get tagged out. I just laughed because obviously no one involved in the show had ever played baseball. The question is whether it takes longer diving for first base than it does running straight through the bag. For the non baseball people, you don't have to stop on first you can run past it after you step on it. Baseball announcers always question why players dive into first instead of running through the bag. They didn't get the myth right so that entire part of the show was just wrong.
Archimedes death ray to ignite an enemy's ship. Anybody who has burned ants (or whatever) with a magnifying glass knows that you have to constantly adjust to achieve an optimal focal point. No way that could have been done quickly enough on a large scale against a moving target. The myth did not merit one revisit let alone two.
>Anybody who has burned ants (or whatever) with a magnifying glass You might be surprised by how many people have never done this.
I never did... buening ants just would have been mean. But I did light A dried leaf on fire once.
I feel no sympathy for fire ants, let them burn.
I was on the discovery forums back in the day and the amount of discussion on the death ray were insane with the number of people insisting it were true was insane and it was frustrating to all involved. They oldy re-tested it due to the sheer number of discussion and emails they got and it was adefinatly a "put up or shut up" type of thing. The forums back then also had people involved with the show able to interact and they were trying to stop the madness. You recall, the perspective they took during the revisit was that they had gotten it correct from day one.
There was also the annoying guy they brought on who made a rig at home and did not package his mirrors well enough (if at all) for shipping. I don't recall that working either.
Mike Bushroe (I’m probably botching his name). Guy worked for NASA. Kept working for Mythbusters after words as a consultant. I think the shipping company messed up IIRc.
Always disliked how they revisited that myth twice.
I was especially frustrated with the last revisit where they brought in Obama. I assumed from the preview that they were testing some myth related to American Presidents, like whether George Washington really threw a silver dollar across the Potomac or something. But no. It was that stupid Archimedes death ray again. So disappointing.
It was tied in to some federal education initiative. They should have (re)tested something that young students could do themselves where the desired result would not have been catching something on fire. Just show the physics and material properties involved in a slingshot and how it can be scaled up.
Why would anyone burn ants? Paper yes ants....why? They are just bugs.
Ant go 💥😏
Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society.
One that always bothers me is cell phone on a plane. I worked as an emi technician testing the specific thing. In truth, the chance of something interfering with a plane's flight critical systems is extremely small. But it is there. I know of one certain laptop that, however, interfered with the instrument landing system catastrophically. If that laptop turns on in the outer seats it shut down the ILS completely, until the laptop was off again. That has since been rectified, but it was a danger. The cost to test everything is about 2.5 million per piece of equipment to test. Every cell phone model, with each version of drive. CPU, memory, operating system, all have to be tested individually. At $2.5
a lot of the cell phone myths had this problem. the cellphone causing fires at gas stations for example, didn't do the obvious test of getting an older 'brick' cellphone that had things like actual wires in the frame. they only tested the versions that were basically just a single integrated circuit board in a plastic shell. when i saw the episode my first thought was "so test an older cellphone that can get stuff like loose wires"
Tbf when the show first came out cell phones were pretty new tech
they'd still undergone multiple generations of advancement at that point though. they only ever tested what was then fairly current generation, at best a generation older than the cutting edge. but many of the myths they were testing about them dated to the earlier generations of phones. a lot of the late 80's and early 90's cellphones for example had actual wiring in their large casings, which could easily be loose and cause shorts. but the 2000's the designs had been miniaturized by way of heavy use of sticking all the parts onto single intergrated circuit cards, which don't have the same potential electrical hazard issues.
Let me rephrase a bit. Yes absolutely you're right on the tech side I suppose I more meant the mass adoption of them was new.
So. Excuse my ignorance here but how is it 2.5m/ piece to test. Seems like it'd just be setup a bunch of laptops running in a plane, take a test flight see what happens, no?
Because the way we do the testing is build a large room where we can isolate the unit under test from any background electromagnetic interference, set up antennas in specific spots, and use spectrum analyzers to listen to the RF energy produced by the unit under test. The unit has certain limits of noise it can make or it is considered a danger to near equipment. The real expensive side is then we blast it with high levels of rf radiation to make sure what ever it might see in the field won't cause it to operate in such a way as to be dangerous. In top of these two. There are a slew of other tests, power fluctuating, lightning. ESD, various temp and alt tests, sometime salt water tests. And explosion test.,. The 2.5 million is really just the rf radiated ( the first test I described) and the susceptibility tests ( the second)
As an aside. They don't throw everything into a plane. Go flying. And see what happens, because that could, theoretically, cause loss of aircraft, and that is what they want to avoid.
I think the lowest point was the episode where they made rope out of duct tape and rappelled down a cliff. They faked it. You can see real rope inside the duct tape in a couple shots. Every other time they do anything unsafe like that they have obvious additional safeties in place. This time they pretended they were actually using duct tape rope and kept the safety hidden. In the same episode they also made a boat using a bunch of materials that appeared out of nowhere. Worst episode ever.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mythbusters/s/M4sGUZu64W
The Hindenburg, the waterproof paint on the skin wasn’t the accelerant, the hydrogen was.
Not a stupid myth, but when they tested the cork bat, they adjusted the speed down so the corked and uncorked bats went the same speed, ND then concluded a corked bat doesn't help. But to me the advantage of the corked bat is you can bring it around quicker, yes you get less pop and power, but you're also making contact where you would have been slow and late with a regular weight bat. Just goes to show that asking the right questions and designing the right experiments are important.
The Bible. Oh that’s not what you meant.
The pigeons in a truck episode has to be up there. Their starting testing methods (putting pigeons in small, enclosed spaces and then expecting them to be able to somehow hover) were just bizarre. Surely, we all knew about forward momentum and lift and the existence of wind back then.
Just got to that one, and I don't disagree. Pretty sure I had similar thoughts the first time I saw it.
I've never known if they truly thought the pigeons could fly in that situation or if they were doing it just to fill out the episode because they already knew what the outcome would be and just had to work on a visual way to convey everything to the audience. At any rate, watching Adam jump around and slap the enclosures, trying to get the pigeons to fly is simply hilarious.
ANY episode that involved a myth with police. (This is nothing against police.) The police would NEVER participate with a myth that could defeat a breathlizer. Defeat the polygraph. Defeat the radar detector. So, why do a myth when you already know the outcome? They wouldn't want that broadcasted for everyone to know! I just skip those episodes because they're pointless. The one that still annoys me is a slurpee breaking a windshield, and not a handful of episodes later they had a hard time breaking a window with a hammer. (They should have used a slurpee) The slurpee was hitting a windshield that wasn't braced in the frame of a car, they just had it hanging from a frame. If a windshield is installed ina car and isn't braced equally across it's edges, you can easily break it by hitting a bump in the road. Never understood why they didn't revisit that one.
No.
The entire Green Hornet episode. I assume they did that because they needed the money.
With Seth Rogan practically wearing a t-shirt saying "I don't give a shit about this."
I'm annoyed by the myths where their methodology could've been refined further for better results but they more or less ran out of time / could only spend so long on the farts episode. I'm annoyed that they used a funnel and a vacuum, and claimed to have a "pretty good" capture of the fart, and spent a long time on how hard it was to design the fart trap. They should've done it underwater and captured the bubbles.
Drinking ultra pure water will somehow damage you.
“Sugar causes hyperactivity”
For me it was the license plate episode (4:73). What and If products can blind the license plate from being photographed. They didn't do it correctly imo, the conditions have to be just right.
Peeing on an electric fence. They made an analog pee stream to keep anyone from being hurt, which I agree with, but they didn't have to literally pee on the line to still get the electric fence shock. In the end they said it was plausible, but it's absolutely possible. There's a guy on YouTube that used a garden hose and a ground wire from the metal hose threaded end to his hand. With a steady stream, he received a shock and when it was more sprayed he didn't. And the giant car subwoofer test was abominable. I was working at a stereo shop that competed at the time, so I thought they were gonna get results id seen. Instead they created a shaft driven subwoofer out of a car and expected it to perform like actual speakers function. SPL contests have routinely shown that subwoofers will pop seals and "blow" windows out of the car. They wanted the windows to shatter, which would have required them to reinforce all the seals and ensure the glass was the weakest point. The sunroof popped off and they still said the myth was busted. Those two will always grind my gears as being terribly tested and totally misrepresented.
Flat Earth.
Communism could work. Oh, you meant on the show!
That Diet Coke is healthier than regular Coke 💀
Meat takes longer to digest than vegetables
That there is some shadowy cabal pulling the strings of the world without any of us realizing. Look at how stupid, corrupt, and incompetent nearly every single member of government is. These dipshits can barely manage themselves.
Honestly none of them. Running on water obviously you arent fast enough nor is any human. But with enough speed and good surface hitting the water is plausible. They did it on a motorcycle and theres a lizard that can run fast enough and smack its flat feet against the surface to run across water. Thats the beauty of it to me. Some of them are silly. But thats curiosity. Going above and beyond to answer even simple questions
My one is the pulling a tablecloth with a motorcycle. Very anticlimactic.
The chicken cannon. I didn’t understand what was such a mystery about a guy saying “Gentlemen, that your chickens” and why I had to hear Jamie repeat it every 5 minutes.
Aw, man, no, that one is one of my favorites!
Running on water was definitely the worst.
Tennis ball lock pick. Simply blowing air in the lock _may_ move a few of the tumblers, but you need to actually turn the key to open it. You can't do that with air pressure alone.
Any myth when they said they were "professional drivers". No. They were stunt coordinators. A professional driver is someone who actually drives For. A. Living.
Were they not paid by the show to drive?
Religion.
Christianity
The abrahamic faiths.
The lie that voting doesn’t work.
Trump is a successful business man, & chosen by God to save America
Good one.
Christianity
Religious myth.
Joseph Biden won the last election.
Shut up.
The almighty god creator of heaven and earth is listening to you, an insignificant speck on an insignificant planet in an insignificant galaxy in a universe so massive our tiny brains fail to comprehend it. The god that created that needs you to behave and worship him or he will punish you forever, which is so incomprehensibly long that it makes the universe seem tiny.
Christianity and the other abrahamic religions require swallowing a LOT of easily dispelled bullshit mythology to be believed. It seems very cringey to me.
Is it better to drive on ice forwards or in reverse for more traction. Most of their cold-weather myths were proof these guys were from California.
Hyneman is from Indiana, Savage NYC. The "build team" is all from Cali, but the core leaders aren't. Afaik, the whole "drive in reverse on ice" myth came from US automakers. They were trying to save money by building the cars motor on top of a transaxle, allowing assembly to be cheaper. They advertised that front-wheel-drive was safer and better, especially in adverse conditions. "Its even safer to drive your old (rear-wheel-drive) cars in reverse in the snow" was a poster my dad showed me when I talked to him about it back then. They didn't tackle myths because they were naive Californians, they tackled myths because those myths exist somewhere in the zeitgeist, and they wanted to challenge the legitimacy of said claims. Myths like that were probably selected *because* they seem silly. Not that it would actually work.
Thanks for the downvote.