One of the hardest things that we have as academics is to inspire students. Obviously,
you guys have no trouble inspiring people. What's the key to getting people excited about science?
We are not trying.
Yes. We just do what we find interesting and fun, and Discovery and our production has
found that if we're having a good time, it makes for good television.
They really have been great about getting out of our way. We got hired into this show.
We didn't conceive of it. We got hired in this talent, and then we sort of grew up and
into and around the show. It grew into being ours. We're now executive producers. But throughout
all of that, we've never been thinking about inspiring kids or making science palatable.
We've really concentrated on solving our own curiosity and telling a good and reasonable
narrative story about that. That's it.
We get e-mails every week from like PhD grads that say they got into their field because
of us. That's how long we've been on the air. We still try not to think of the children
when we're making the show because as Jamie says, "Yes, we're just trying to write a story about our own curiosity."
Well, the beauty of that is that it puts out a message that science isn't just for guys
in lab coats. It's for anybody that simply wants to do a good job of answering a question,
and so that's all we do. We simply want to do a good job when we got hired to do this
show. We're dealing with urban legends. We got to figure out some solution to some problem
or answer a question, so we started to get real methodical about it. Well, that's science.
I think that one of the things that we do do that makes the show connect with all different
ages is that we really always try and start from the idea: what would two guys on a Sunday
do in their garage to figure this out?
The first test is the stupidest—not the stupidest, but the simplest. Well, you know,
we could—and we often have to un-fancy our ideas. We start off on a wild case, "So, first,
we're going to get some tubing and we'll run some valves at..." "No, no, no. Let's do it
with razorblades and chewing gum. We can set something up and just try it." Always trying
to start from the simplest and then moving to the complex, so that there really is a progression.
One of the things that we've learned is that science programming up until "MythBusters"
is what we would call science demonstration programming. Say, here's a concept, terminal
velocity, and here I'm going to show something that demonstrates it. We don't have any of
that background, so we're like, "All right. Well, what's the terminal velocity of a penny?"
"I don't know." "Well, instead of doing it with math, let's actually conduct an experiment
that figures it out." That experimentation is—the audience is right with us. They don't
know what's going to happen, and neither do we. The fact is that there's no producer that
writes down the story of our episodes before we start to film. We have an outline, and
we almost never follow it. When we come to a result we didn't expect, we change directions.
So why do you think people find science so intimidating?
There's a place in which culturally we've place science in this elite category. It's
like, "Well, that's for people who are smart," and it's not. It's for anybody.
When we started doing this show, we thought we came to the table with some skills because
we both worked for decades in the special effects industry. About three or four years
ago, we were on a plane, and we were just kind of reassessing what we've learned over
the previous eight or nine years. We were like, "Wow, it's totally incredible," just
from our own personal standpoint. All we've been doing is arguing over critical thinking
and an ethical methodology that is robust and rigorous and makes sense to both of us.
Those sort of arguments, while in the momentj they might not be entertaining to be having,
the fact is that they breed such a refined result that we totally understand that that's part of the process.
I was talking to a friend the other day who's an editor. He's a filmmaker, and a wonderful
filmmaker. Somebody asked him if he was good at math. He says, "I'm great at math. I'm
just not so good at numbers." He had a beautiful point because, as an editor—of course, editing
is all about this careful math and alchemy of timing and rhythm and beats in telling
a story. It's not about doing equations or an algorithm, but it's really about being
sensitive to a rhythm, and that's math. He's right. He is great at math, even though he
can't add or balance his checkbook. If more people understood that, more people understood
that science is merely thinking critically—so you could answer a question that someone presents
to you just by sitting down and running some numbers, or thinking through the whole problem
rather than thinking, "Well, that's something for smart people to figure out."
Do you think people can—I mean, obviously, you guys have the equipment and the time.
It's your jobs to do this sort of thing. Can everyday people do myth-busting?
The simple translation of what you just asked is: can everyday people answer questions, ask and answer questions?
Yes. Can they think critically through a problem?
Yes. Yes, absolutely, they can do that, and they can do it in more or less degrees of
diligence and care. That's dependent on the nature of what the question they're asking
is and how important it is, how methodical they want to be.
What I was saying is that this was something that we came into—to realize by accident
was that we don't start doing one of these experiments saying, "Let's go do some science."
We just want to do a good job. So any average person out there that wants to do a good job
of understanding their world is in effect doing some form of science. They're just being
methodical and careful about how they're moving through the process of answering that question.
I'll give a great example of this. I had someone e-mail me a few years ago and said, "Hey,
I heard that the air around the Eiffel Tower weighs more—if you bound the Eiffel Tower
in a box, the air in that box would weigh more than the actual Eiffel Tower." I was
like, "That sounds like a total BS," but it also sounds like math that I can do. So I
figured out what the square of the base of the Eiffel Tower was. Then I figured out what
the height was. Length times width times height. I figured out how much air on the average
weighs. Lo, not the case. But wait, I was measuring the square of the Eiffel Tower.
What if I drew a cylinder with the square bound within a circle? At that point, the
air did weigh more, and I was accounting for the thinner air at the top, averaging across.
It was five minutes of sitting with a calculator on my computer, just adding some numbers and
putting them into a form and thinking about it, and I answered a question.
I found myself thrilled by the process. It's not that complicated to think critically through
a problem and think, "Am I not thinking this clear enough? I'm doing a square. Let's circle it,
and let's see what happens there." That's the kind of stuff we do on the show every day.
I personally find that the smartest people I meet, that we get to meet and spend time
with, are always willing to say they don't know something. That's one. Two is they seem
to be, generally, serially fascinated by many things. That is something that comes from,
I think, I believe, from critical thinking, that you may have your field of expertise,
but if you're genuinely interested in it and you're interested in thinking critically about
it to understand what its shortcomings are and maybe you can overcome them, then actually,
all of a sudden, all these other fields become much more interesting because you can apply
your own analysis to them. You can apply your analysis to the news that's happening. You
can apply your analysis to a report about a scientific paper and say, "Actually, I don't
think that their—it doesn't sound right to me. Let me look into their..." I mean,
we do that, and we know people that do that.
It's like whenever we go to NASA. Every scientist we've ever worked with at NASA has incredible
hobbies that they do on the weekends. Either they race cars, or they fly RC planes, or
they're interested in fluid dynamics. Whatever it is, they give their all to it in their
off time. These are people who just need to feed their brains. The fact is, is that it's
exponential: the more you do it, the more you want to do it.