There's a nice article in the Times today about Mythbusters as science television. As is typical of the Times, it sort of overreaches with some of the conclusions:
Their delight in discovery for its own sake is familiar to most scientists, who welcome any result because it either confirms or debunks a hypothesis. That sense of things can be corrupted when grants or licensing deals are on the line. But the Mythbusters get paid whether their experiments succeed or fail.
but it's generally a good piece.
The show is somewhere on the good side of "guilty pleasure." Scientifically, a lot of what they do is completely daft, but at the same time, it's fun to watch them blow stuff up in contrived ways...
Comments
# 1 | Asad Aboobaker | November 21, 2006 11:19 AM
I agree it was a pretty good article. The one thing that annoys me about Mythbusters is that they often get SO close do doing really definitive experiments...but then there's one little piece that's left out. For example, in the Hindenburg bit, they want to know if it was the paint or the hydrogen that caused the catastrophe...so they test the paint separately, the hydrogen with the paint...and then thermite :( In this case, I think the desire to make a really big fire won out over the desire to do the right test.
I still enjoy the show, though...
# 2 | gg | November 21, 2006 5:03 PM
The excerpt you quote is somewhat annoying, since it implies that the Mythbusters are more 'pure' than scientists, because scientists have to worry about those pesky positive results while the Mythbusters don't have any vested interest. This is flat-out goofy, because the Mythbusters simply have a different criteria for success - true or not, the myth has to make good television (there have been a few episodes where you can see the strain of failing to get a picturesque result start to take hold.)