hi everybody um do i seem like overly dimly lit i feel like i'm dimming it
oh well that's better hi everybody uh adam savage in my cave uh answering questions about my tenure
as a host of mythbusters um these questions have been submitted by tested patrons
this question is from daniel porter oh sorry daryl daryl porter sorry daryl daryl porter says
this is a fun question how did the teams mentally get into the myths that let's be honest
had no basis in science oh and they give examples i'm thinking
specifically about free energy and 300 miles per gallon carburetor add-ons
your question is an interesting question because it has some assumptions
it has some assumptions and i'd like to tackle them for a second because
they're useful to talk about you use the word use the phrase no basis in science
um
let's talk about those myths in general free energy free energy otherwise known as over
unity
sorry free energy otherwise known as over unity
um otherwise known as dude what if you connected a battery to a generator that sent its power back
to the battery and then it would run forever no it wouldn't no conservation of energy says no
the laws of physics say no free energy absolutely is unsupportable by physics
so how do you test free energy how do you when you when one has a science show in which
one tests things like we did and one looks out online and sees whoa gaze upon the field of people
discussing free energy and many people are out there cheating other people out of money
for free energy many people are charlatans and they are liars and confidence men and they are
stealing money based on fake free energy projects so how can i contribute to that conversation
i want to because people are believing in something that
is not possible thus i would like to do an experiment that shows that so that's
you you asked this question as if we looked at everything on mythbusters as like well
does it have any basis in science well if it doesn't then we should just not do it ah
that phrase no basis in science it is actually a meaningless phrase i i'm not criticizing you for
using it i'm really not um but i'd like to talk about it because it's important to understand
that it is a meaningless phrase when you say no basis in science what do you actually mean it's
i'm not asking you it's a rhetorical question i'm actually going to try and unpack this a little bit
you mean so science no basis in science so it sounds like science is this monolith
and it's like a dictionary with like a big set of rules and if free energy can't jive with science
with science then it has no basis in science right i guess that's kind of what you mean but science
isn't a dictionary science isn't a compendium of knowledge science is not a compendium of knowledge
science is not a compendium of knowledge science is a process
that's the most important thing for me to tell you about your question
so the question isn't how scientifically valid is this thing that people believe
it is can we use the process of science to help them understand the truth
and in the case of free energy that was really problematic because there's endless theories
about free energy and so what are you gonna do you're gonna take a generator hook it up
to a battery that powers the generator and sends a signal back to the battery sure you could do that
but then you've only done it with one battery and one generator and someone says well i
used a different battery in a different generator and i got a different result
so it ends up being almost like cryptozoology that like if you tackle one free energy thing
and it doesn't work you've only proven that that one doesn't work you haven't dispelled
the whole idea of free energy so immediately when we were thinking about it it became this concept
it was just like too big for us to tackle and then um i can't remember who i can't
remember who it was but in the story meeting we realized well wait a minute are there any
what testable propositions do we have right so one testable proposition is
is it possible to create free energy but that's a gigantic technical proposition
but what if someone sells a product we could build that and we could test it and that was the handle
by which we started to shake free energy loose as an episode
while i agree with you the concept of over unity is [ __ ] and does not have a basis
in in any scientific understanding we currently have about physics
being careful about my wording there um that does not mean that one cannot
use the tools and process of science to help people understand that concept that's why we
did that episode that's also why we did the 300 miles per gallon fuel efficiency stuff
um and that felt actually like a narrative breakthrough for us on mythbusters uh because
there are subjects that felt too big to tackle and so we had to localize those into things that we
could purchase that people said weren't and we had to prove that it didn't work and it couldn't work
so that is how we mentally prepared for those episodes right we thought we should do free energy
we should tackle free energy we started looking at free energy oh my god it's way too big it's just
gigantic monolith how are we gonna tackle it okay wait let's break it down into chunks what
are the testable propositions we can tackle oh somebody sells this thing let's buy it let's put
it together someone says this kit works and a lot of other people are saying that it does too
they're all full of crap we're going to build it and we're going to prove that
that's how we built that episode so far from those episodes having quote no basis in science
the difficulty for us in mentally getting into those myths was figuring out where to apply the
process of scientific discovery in order to build the narrative that we were interested in filming
i recognize i just did some linguistic needle threading but it's really important because of
the way we culturally use the word science it's vital that you remember what a process
science is and that science isn't there to give us incontrovertible facts
about the universe there are preciously few incontrovertible facts about the universe what
science gives us is a process by which we are able to continually expand our
understanding of what is around us and what we are and what we're doing here
daryl porter thank you so much for asking such a simple question which i totally understood what
you were what you were getting at and giving me uh a landscape in which to tackle some much
bigger questions i really enjoyed that one thank you guys so much tested patrons keep submitting
your questions i will keep answering them here everybody stay safe i'll see you next time