Mythbusters



I haven’t written about this before, but Mythbusters (Discovery, Wednesdays at 9 plus several repeats) is the greatest show ever. It’s about two special effects guys, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who destroy stuff. Yeah, there’s some sort of tenuous framing device about how they’re trying to prove whether certain urban legends are plausible or not but it hardly matters. Adam and Jamie could be investigating whether kittens are soft and they’d somehow blow up a Dodge Charger by the end of the segment.


"Marshmallows are done!"

In one of the recent episodes they investigated whether you could make a death ray using mirrors to reflect sunlight at a point. This was allegedly to determine if Archimedes had designed a similar weapon for use in naval engagements thousands of years ago. Adam built this huge, complicated array of mirrors, but it didn’t work. It was pretty obvious why. While Adam had done calculations to figure out how much sunlight he would have to reflect on a point to reach the temperature of ignition, he forgot that his array would be reflecting light to an area no smaller than the largest mirror in the array, and then only if aimed very precisely. To deal with their disappointment Jamie and Adam doused the test target with gasoline and threw Molotov cocktails at it.

In last week's episode Adam and Jamie took on the question of whether or not jumping at the last second before impact would save you from death in a falling elevator. Sure you could get somebody with a doctorate in physics to do a bunch of calculations to show what would happen, but all that would prove is that people with doctorates are pussies. Adam and Jamie went out and found an abandoned hotel with an elevator, rigged the elevator to fall, and then rigged a crash test dummy to jump when the car was almost at the bottom of the shaft. The results were… spectacular. Sure, any physicist could have predicted the outcome, but it was fun to watch...

Posted: Wed - October 13, 2004 at      

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