When we were asked what the best science TV show is, a couple of people answered Mythbusters. It turns out it's not a science show. Here's how Jamie Hyneman, one of the shows creators, describes it:
Mr. Hyneman, however, insists that he and the "Mythbusters" team "don't have any pretense of teaching science . . . If we tried to teach science," he said, "the shows probably wouldn't be successful."
Even if they aren't teaching science, they are approaching problems using experimentation. So, they're doing science (minus the whole 'replication' thing), even if they aren't calling it that.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Some readers have called to my attention a pair of recent stories from the New York Times that you may find interesting.
First, Audrey noted another dispatch on the eternal struggle over how math ought to be taught:
For the second time in a generation, education officials are rethinking the…
Orson Scott Card has written a long essay defending Intelligent Design.
Oy, but it is depressing.
It's a graceless hash, a cluttered and confusing mish-mash of poorly organized complaints about those darned wicked "Darwinists". He lists 7 arguments. Then he repeats his list, expanding on them.…
Ars Technica has an article on bad science in entertainment, with a list of items that were particularly annoying:
Any time Star Trek tried to do biology. They may have been awful with all the other areas of science, but I'm a biologist, and I know they were awful with this. Note to film and TV…
I have a friend who, about 15 years ago, went from being a high school teacher to being the chief lobbyist of a very large company. A couple weeks ago we had a conversation in which he said that if he was still teaching advanced government, now that he's actually worked up close with the…
well, it is teaching science by teaching how to develop an experiment, and even to the point of talking about what variables they tried to control and why an experiment might have failed.
it is showing the scientific method: research, hypothesis (do we expect to bust the myth or not?), more research to build the experiment, review in a larger community how the experiment will address the hypothesis, build and conduct the experiment (with variations to try to help isolate variables), and reach a conclusion.
this is what is taught at the middle-school level. the larger scientific process (publish in peer-review and let others try it) is left out only because the methodology and subject matter isn't precise enough for Scientific American and the there's always those key words: don't try this at home! :)
so the only real factor is having an independent review look at the methodology after it's conducted, but it teaches enough skepticism along the way that it can become an "exercise for the viewer". the viewer, the audience, then becomes the "peer review".
I think it's science at a level that popular culture needs. as a first step at trying to get science back onto television with an audience willing to watch it, I think it works well.
Mythbusters lacks a few other aspects of actual science, too. For a start, they make constantly the "correlation equals causation" fallacy. Moreover, their reasoning on physical matters is often poor. They tested the myth about a cherrypicker acting as a catapult, and it failed (of course) but then they suspended the cherrypicker between shipping containers and tried to catapult their long-suffering crash test dummy, Buster, by pulling it back and releasing it. Of course, Buster, being constrained by the cage, inscribed a circle and was dumped at the end of the rotation - hasn't anyone told them about centripetal force? The reason why trebuchets release the load at the top of the arc is because if they don't, they will do just what happened to Buster. And anyone could see that from the way they set it up.
But it's fun, and they do blow things up a lot...