One of the things that you guys do extremely well, that I can't say so much for my scientific
colleagues, is admit when you're wrong and recognize that we make mistakes.
Does that happen often? Have you guys made many errors?
Actually, that's probably the most important question to ask here. The thing is, we love
it when we're wrong. It's like the best possible thing that can happen to us—is to be wrong.
The simple reason is that that's an opportunity for us to learn something. If we weren't wrong,
then we're just wasting our time. We didn't learn anything. When there's a failure or
if we've taken a particular course that has led us down a path that's been unproductive,
we have to stop and ask, "Well, why? What was it that I was doing wrong?" That's when
the light bulb goes off, and that's when you're on your road to do some new adventure or discovery.
Without being wrong, you're just going through the motions.
When you construct an experiment and you believe your methodology is as robust as you could
have possibly made it, then you come to an answer that is the opposite of what you expected
to happen, and you run and check your numbers and you realize that it is genuinely the opposite
of what you expected, it's thrilling. It's absolutely thrilling.
Someone said, "Do you mind busting things?" We're totally agnostic when it comes to whether
it's busted, plausible, or confirmed. We don't really care. But what we genuinely do love
is learning something. Yes, like Jamie said, it's learning something new.
Science is messy. The two most important science teachers I had in all my schooling—both
were willing, when I asked a question, to say, "Actually, that's something I don't know."
These are people in authority, and teachers generally don't like to say they don't know something.
These were teachers who were willing to say that, and that showed me that there
was a space to be—there was a space that I could perhaps both learn and potentially contribute. That's totally vital.
Have you been surprised before in one of your—really surprised? I mean, you've absolutely lined things up and...
I have a great example of when we were genuinely shocked. We did a story a bunch of years ago
called "Killer Cable Snap." Now there's not a fisherman in the world who doesn't believe
that if a braided steel cable on a boat gets stretched to its breaking strength, that when
it breaks, it can whip around and slice right through you. Now I'm eliminating aircraft
carrier cables because those are about this big around, and that's more like getting hit
by a building. That's not a "whipping cable." But there's thousands of anecdotal reports,
legs severed—and I'm also eliminating things like a boat rope pulling you against the dock
because of the storm and slicing your legs off. That's totally happened. We're talking
a whipping cable having enough energy to slice through you.
So we built a methodology where we figured out how to cut a cable stretched to its strength
around a bollard so that it whipped around at this incredibly high speed. We then got
several grades of cable and a hydraulic cutter. We got a hydraulic puller that would stretch
the cable to within 85 percent of its breaking strength, and then we'd slice it. Right at
the apex of the cable's whip, we placed pigs, real pigs. We really thought we were going
to cut these beautiful high-speed shots of the cable slicing right through.
Pigs didn't like it much.
They were already dead. Come lunchtime, we tested three different cables, and we'd only
been denting pigs. We hadn't even broken skin. We called up our producer on that, Linda,
and we said—she'd been researching this for months—we said, "In all of the research,
do you have a single first-hand visual account of this happening?" She said, "I'm sure I
do. I'm sure I do," and she went and she called back an hour later and said, "I don't."
We realized we're going to have to bust this because the evidence does not support that
this has ever happened. There are plenty of other ways to get sliced in half by ropes
and cables on a boat, but whipping is not one of them, and we totally busted it, and
we began the day totally believing we were going to totally confirm it.
Those kinds of things happen all the time. The longer we do this, the less cocky we get about our...
Yes, totally.
There can be some really stupid simple question about something that, "Of course that's going
to happen," and then, "Darn, I didn't think that wouldn't happen."
In fact, given the vagaries of making a television show, there are times that we have to shoot
out of order because we lose a location or we have some sort of snafu or something occurs.
It's happened. We are good at doing what we call backfilling: go in and shoot what we
need, and then we'll backfill it later when we find out what the actual results are.
But, occasionally, we have placed ourselves in a position of shooting out of order, going,
"That's okay. We can shoot out of order because we know what the results of that experiment
are going to be." We don't do that anymore because every single time we've done it, every
single time we've put our eggs in the basket of well-we-know-how-that's-going-to-turn-out,
we've been boned. We stopped ever expecting, even when we've seen people do it and we've
had experts tell us, "This is what's going to happen," we don't count on it until we've seen it.
How about your viewers? Have they been fairly reluctant often to change their opinion if
you do bust or confirm a myth that they hold dear?
Absolutely. The best known one was a plane on a conveyor belt, and the idea was that
if a conveyor belt is going in one direction fast enough, a plane that's sitting on it
can't go fast enough in the other direction and take off. That's just...
The question itself has a trick within it which leads you to believe that the plane
will somehow remain stationary. The fact is the plane will never remain stationary. The
plane will always push forward no matter how fast the conveyor belt's moving. We demonstrated
this on the show—to much of Jamie's chagrin because he was like, "Why are we even testing?
It's stupid. It's totally obvious what would happen." We tested it on the show, and, I
mean, back then Jamie's shop number was—you could find it online if you looked hard enough.
When that show aired people were calling his number all night long and screaming at him
that we had somehow cheated the data and we were lying, and it was all because we'd come
to a different result than they expected. They were open about saying that, "Well, they're
wrong." Well, why? "Because they came to a result I didn't expect."
Yeah, I think that was one of the first times that I really—it put it front and center—this
whole thing about belief—that is, people—they just want to believe stuff. If you can present
evidence that denies it, it doesn't seem to affect people. I mean, there's a lot of things
to do with religion that line up with that.
Global-warming, politics, etcetera.
Personally, I, on the other hand, I ask myself, "Is there anything that I actually simply
believe in?" Belief sort of implies believing things or an understanding that does not require
proof or evidence. You simply accept it. And I can't think of anything that, personally,
I simply accept. I'll accept it until...
Until the evidence to the contrary.
Yes, that's pretty much all there is to it. It amazes me that in this day and age that
a lot of people, if not the majority of people in the world, aren't that way.
Yes. I mean look, the fact is—and the argument will get put out all the time on the line
in other debate forums that, well, science is a religion. Science is a religion that
is based just as much on faith in science, as religion is based on faith in a supreme
power, except that, as Tim Minchin says, "No, that's total BS," because science adjusts
its views based on evidence. It actually will change its understanding of things, and this
has happened multiple times throughout the history of science. It's still happening today
with major experiments, changed whole fields overnight, when the data gets confirmed. And
that's as it should be. Like we said, it's a messy process, and people would benefit
from understanding that it's a messy process, that it's one that we could all contribute to.
Well, we get referred to in a lot of cases as scientists, and the fact is that neither
of us have science educations per se, like a formal university-type science education
or degree or background. But I think one of the strongest things that would actually say
that we are scientists would be that both Adam and I have sort of a pact that if there
is evidence to the contrary—like, in particular, when we're arguing amongst each other over
some particular thing that we're trying to problem solve, as to how we problem solve
it or what the results are—the minute that there's clear evidence to the contrary, even
though this may have been an idea that one of us has been championing just to the death
that this is the way to do it, the minute that there's anything that pops up on the
radar that changes that, it's point of pride for us to do immediate, without hesitation,
back flip and agree with the other person or go off in a new direction. I would like
to think that's fundamental to science.
Ideally.
It's also fundamental to us wanting to understand, really understand, the world and our place
in it and the things that we run across. There again, it plays towards science isn't just
for scientists. It's for anybody with integrity that really honestly wants to understand their world.
Yes. When you're on the veldt and you're trying to kill an animal and you learn that one
kind of sharpened stick works better at killing them than another, that's a scientific experiment.
Humans, by their nature, are scientists. We are explorers; we are tinkerers and thinkers;
and we want to understand the world around us. Every time you come up with a better method
for doing something, you have applied the scientific method in order to determine that.
You've taken variables; you've looked at them; you've compared them; and you've chosen the
one that works better, really, that's it. That's science, baby.