If 'Mythbusters' can't solve it, they'll have fun blowing it up
December 21, 2004

Don't drink that Coke while you're eating Pop Rocks!
Your stomach will explode!

And don't drop that frozen turkey directly into a deep-fat
fryer, not unless you want to see another explosion.

But you should wrap your snowman in a jacket so it'll melt
slower.

True stories or myths?

Who ya gonna call? The "Mythbusters," of course. These two
guys on cable's Discovery Channel are deep into their
second season of investigating, and often literally
exploding, notions that a surprising number of people
believe are really true.

Once, they inquired whether it's true that a small child
can becarried away by a cluster of helium-filled balloons.
They did it in the simplest way possible - take hundreds
and hundreds of balloons, place string in hand of 3-year-
old girl. The girl remained Earth-bound.

Tomorrow, they bring back viewers' 10 favorite myths of
past shows, while they also investigate a few widely held
beliefs that crop up every year about this time.

There's that snowman theory, for instance. Will a nice warm
coat keep a snowman frozen? The "Mythbusters," Jamie
Hyneman and Adam Savage, two special effects experts, build
a couple of snowmen, hang a coat, complete with hood and
scarf, on one and leave the other naked. It's true, the
unclothed one melts faster.

The frozen turkey? The hot grease boils over, but the
turkey doesn't explode. As for combining Coke and Pop Rocks
- not to worry.

And dropping the handle end of a silver spoon into a
champagne bottle does nothing to keep the bubbly bubbly.

Hyneman and Savage attack all these problems with the
enthusiasm of a pair of small boys exploring a forbidden
closet. When they succeed in exploding a myth with an
actual explosion, they react with hysterical glee, like
those same two boys ramming an electric train into a wall
of wooden blocks.

One stunt they especially enjoyed involved shooting frozen
and thawed chicken carcasses from a cannon at the cockpit
of an airplane to see which would crash through the panes.

Right now, they're testing the old saying that "a rolling
stone gathers no moss." True, or myth? The test has been
going on for four months, so far.

"We want to really make sure we've got it right," said
Savage, who's slim, 37, and decorated with a close-cut red
goatee. "It might be the longest, shallowest hill in the
world. At this point, our pieces of granite have not
gathered any moss, but we're still not convinced, there's
still some tweaking to do."

Savage, who describes the show as "Jackass Meets Mr.
Wizard," admits that "Jamie and I are not scientists. We're
basically just a notch above your backyard tinkerers. But
we've been paid to gather all these skills all these years.

"And the 'Jackass' part is that we're trying it on
ourselves.  The entertaining thing is that it's real. Our
confusion is real, our excitement about the solutions is
real, and what we learn is real."

Savage began as a child actor - he was once Mr. Whipple's
stock boy in a Charmin commercial - then graduated into
designing and building special effects for movies and TV
shows, also Hyneman's trade. Now, mythbusting is his full-
time job.

What they practice might be described as "folk science,"
looking into the truth of folk tales, popular beliefs and
adages, but in ways regular folks might do without benefit
of a laboratory.

Their experiments can be pretty elaborate, however, whether
they're attaching rockets to an old Chevy and sending it
zooming across a dry lake bed or hollowing out a log to
make a wooden cannon to see if it'll explode when fired.
(It did, when jammed with enough gunpowder.)

Soon, they'll be repeating another experiment, asking
whether a car gets better gas mileage at freeway speeds
with the windows open, or with the windows closed and the
air conditioner blowing.

"We tried it once before, on a half-mile track where we
couldn't go over 45 miles an hour," said Savage. "We got a
lot of complaints that said the big switchover in wind
resistance happens between 45 and 55 miles per hour. So the
results, that windows-down is more efficient, would be
different going 10 miles an hour faster.

"So we're going to go back to a faster track and retest
it."

Actual scientists, he said, "are constantly contacting us
and telling us what we're doing is exactly the way it
really is. We are applying the scientific method. We have a
question to answer - often the biggest problem is figuring
out just what the question is we're trying to answer - then
we'll come up with a hypothesis and test it.

"This is a good way to describe the type of employment
Jamie and I have always sought out. We got into special
effects because it's something different every single day.
and it's always a new set of problems to solve.

"Wherever we can, we actually demonstrate the concept
physically, rather than say we did some math and here's
what the figure is.  At some point we'll be testing `a
stitch in time saves nine,' if we can figure out what it
means."