i'm jamie hyneman on reddit ama I am a whatever the question I'm answering is
one from ho4 X what's one myth you've always wanted to test but couldn't due
to financial slash illegals that slash safety etc reasons there's this one
thing that for some reason I can't talk anybody else into getting interested in
but me and it's based on the on a story that Cary Grant or did a while ago where
they had a baseball or a guy on a train who's a professional pitcher rather has
a baseball and he throws it backwards in the direction opposite to which the
train is going and he throws it at exactly the same speed that the train is
traveling so to a person on the side the suppose admit is the ball would drop
straight out of the air and just sit there on the ground and so that's all
well and good they tested it and it and it's possible and everything but the
thing is I want to be the baseball and my idea is that we would set up some
sort of a low trailer sort of a thing and put it on a truck or trailer behind
a truck and we would put a backward facing slingshot like you know out of
surgical rubber tubing or bungee cords and and I would get into a sort of a pod
or maybe you can just sit on a chair or something and get fired backwards at the
same rate that the truck is going forward now for some reason insurance
won't let me do this and you know my my problem with that and the reason that I
should be able to do it is that you know we can deal with these things
incrementally like for example would you let me do it at five miles an hour of
course you would you probably let me do it at ten miles an hour and if it's safe
at ten miles an hour and there's absolutely no problem why not you know
fifteen or twenty or fifty you work your way up to it and of course you can be in
some sort of like if there's any kind of question you can
have protection like a bee in a cage or a pod that that you know won't that
nothing bad can happen and and or we can also test Buster before doing it now the
thing that they're worried about and this is where it got interesting for me
is that I started to break it down and it's not the fall it's the potential
problem that you'll have if there's a mismatch in speed if the bungee cord
doesn't shoot you backwards at exactly the same speed that the truck is going
forward and and so the you know you can set up this slingshot thing so it's
right above the ground so it's not the fall it's about that mismatch and what
happens with myth mismatch as I started to think about it is mainly friction
because once friction starts to come into the equation the thing that touches
the ground first is going to catch while the rest of you wants to keep going and
so you start to tumble and if all this is happening really fast then you tumble
really fast and you break your bones in your head or whatever but assuming that
we've not got any kind of like curbs or obstacles like we do it out on there a
runway or something like that if you don't have any friction you've not got
any kind of problem with tumbling you're just going to slide that's what they
have that's why they have a motorcycle gear that is armored doing with plastic
or leather and if the motorcycle falls down as long as you don't hit a curb or
something you're just going to slide you're going to be fine and and so I you
know reasoned that the other way to do it or of course is like there's all
sorts of different ways of removing friction then that could be lots of
lubrication which would be quite funny and make for a good episode and I don't
know why the producers don't think that that's fun but the other thing one could
do is is have something that is something like a like a ski or a shallow
metal pan and so you get you know fired to speed if there's a Mitch Matt and
this mismatch of these philosophies you're just going to the pan will send
out some ARC's or something or maybe it's a
plastic thing you're just going to slide and so the end result of all this
testing would be that in theory you could have a bus that could go buy a bus
stop and deliver passengers without even slowing down which you know may not be
something that gets picked up by mass transit I'm sure in the near future but
it would be fun to try it