Five meters high, in the courtyard of the school we were staying at. But I did watch Mythbustres, so we headed out to the hardware store, bought some PVC and built our own setup. Had I not watched the Mythbusters, I might have tried to Google "hydraulic conductivity soil Africa" and use whatever I would have found. At one point we needed to know the hydraulic conductivity 3 of the local soil. (c) XKCD Īt the end of my MSc I spend three months in Kenya, studying groundwater. As Randall Munroe (from XKCD) noted: "Mythbusters is doing more to drag humanity out of the unscientific darkness than a thousands lessons in rigor". They showed that the best way to see if something can be done is by just starting and seeing how far you get. That building stuff is both doable and extremely fun. That you can do most of these tests yourself. They taught a whole generation that ideas need to be tested to be considered true. It is hard to overstate the impact that the Mythbusters had. Five years of formal physics training had mainly taught me to think about physics, two seasons of Mythbusters taught me that, with some duct tape, I could build and test anything I wanted. It always felt like I could have done them myself. The beauty, the freshness, the newness of the Mythbusters was in the way they did the experiments. And suddenly, on tv, there were the Mythbusters, throwing my world upside down: does a duck's quack echo? You can reason it does, but why not just test it? Let's get a microphone, a wall and a duck and do an experiment. Only ten percent was doing actual experiments.
To me, ninety percent of science was putting existing knowledge in computer models to calculate all kind of different situations. I was doing my MSc in physics (acoustics), and my image of science was formed by the big, expensive labs in our physics department. The first episode of Mythbusters aired september 5th 2004 2.
Following in the paddlestrokes of the heroes from my formative years! Fast forward another 8 months and I am in a boat, made out of raincoats, escaping from Alcatraz. Fast forward 10 years and I am having lunch with Adam Savage, discussing how our research fits into his experience. I am watching my new heroes: Mythbusters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman 1 escape from Alcatraz, paddling to freedom in a boat made from raincoats.
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