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On 06/05/2012 08:36 AM, LaMontagne, Bob wrote:
I have been following the postings on this topic and am a little
surprised at the derision heaped on Mythbusters. In this episode, do
they ever claim to demonstrate that 4 inches of bubble wrap will
protect a falling person? Do they actually demonstrate the opposite?
Instead of long "chalk and talks" they go out and actually test
"myths" and "old-wives tales". Isn't that a great way to get people
interested in physics and other sciences? They are not approaching
things as scientists - rather they act as the "man on the street" who
just goes out and tries things to see if they are really true.
What's the point of teaching high-school physics, if the "man on the
street" cannot figure out that four inches of bubble-wrap (or anything
else) cannot protect you against a three-story fall?
Let's consider the following scenario:
Imagine you are a small business owner. Suppose that one of your
employees needed to know whether four inches of bubble wrap would
protect your products -- or your personnel -- against a three-story
fall. You discover that the employee had put together a multi-
person team. The entire team had spent multiple days investigating
the question in a highly entertaining fashion.
All of the payroll and other expenses come out of *your* pocket,
which would make the incident highly non-entertaining from your
point of view. In order to survive in business, you would absolutely
need to fire the perpetrator(s) and hire somebody else. As part of
the hiring interview process, you could ask candidates how they would
have answered this question. Shop around until you find somebody
who can answer the question in a few seconds ... in other words,
somebody who actually _learned_ something in high-school physics.
End of scenario.
In real life, sometimes I get paid to do entertainment. Sometimes
I get paid to do science. They're not the same.
Sometimes I even get paid to hire people to do science *for* the
entertainment industry. I guarantee you that somebody who can't
tell the difference between science and entertainment won't get
hired.
Real-world science should give kids good positive motivation to pay
attention in class. Dear student: The crash-protection question
is the sort of question that you should know how to answer. It is
an example of real-world physics. Crashes do occur in the real world.
If you want to get a good job -- one that doesn't involve asking "would
you like fries with that" -- you need to learn how to figure out a
question like this, and thousands of other equally-simple questions.
Also you need to learn that doing days and days of experiments is not
an appropriate real-world way to answer such a simple question.
In particular: Sometimes it is entertaining to pretend to be stupid.
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/narbonic_ruleoffunny.png
Smart people can /pretend/ to be stupid, if that's what's called for.
OTOH, stupid people cannot pretend to be smart.
On the third hand, often the smart thing is actually more entertaining.
There are plenty of examples, from within the Mythbusters world and
otherwise:
*) In the case of the "360 degree swing" if they had fired the
rocket at the correct phase of the cycle, they would have gotten
a *more* entertaining result. Anybody who /understood/ high-
school physics could have figured this out instantly.
*) On several occasions they have shot into the air various things
that tumbled because they were aerodynamically unstable. If they
had had the first clue about stability principles they would have
gotten a *more* entertaining result. I learned about stability
when I was about 12 years old, initially because my father told me,
and secondarily because I read the page or two of instructions that
came in the model-rocket kit and did some experiments.
*) In the case of "killer cable snap", the experiment they did _vastly_
underestimates how dangerous a cable snap can be. Once again, there
is some interesting physics here, and the smart experiment would have
been *much* more interesting than the dumb experiment. The physics
here is slightly tricky, in the sense that part of the answer requires
more than first-semester high-school physics. Specifically:
-- Using only first-semester high-school physics, you can instantly
understand why the experiment they did gets the result they got.
-- If you want to do better, you need to have paid attention during
the /second/ semester of high-school physics or maybe even college
physics ... and you need to have a little bit of imagination, so
that you can imagine other experimental set-ups.
The details don't matter to this thread, but if anybody wants to
discuss cable snaps, we can do that. It's interesting. Symmetry
enters the discussion in a surprising way. My favorite solution
is related to the physics of baseball and the physics of golf in a
interesting way
http://www.tutelman.com/golf/swing/golfSwingPhysics2.php
but there are other solutions also.
am a little
surprised at the derision heaped on Mythbusters.
I do not disrespect the Mythbusters. They are good at their job. They
have a good eye for entertainment. It's what they do. They pretend to
do science, but it's not really science. If you thought it was science,
I'm sorry to disappoint you.
In order to avoid further disappointment, I promise not to tell you
that professional wrestling is staged.
As an additional data point, I refer you to "the rule of funny"
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfFunny
This greatly predates Roger Rabbit but was famously expressed quite
directly in that film:
Eddie: You mean you could have taken your hand out of that cuff at any
time?!
Roger: No, not at any time. Only when it was funny.
As yet another data point, I refer you to the Mythbusters episode
*before* last. They discussed a myth that involved filling a van with
explosive gas and setting it off. The myth was instantly confirmed.
Long ago they carried out the experiment but they did not show it on
the air ... because it didn't fit the story they wanted to tell. Note
the contrast:
-- From an entertainment point of view, this experiment was a failure.
-- From a science point of view, this experiment was a success. It
answered the question.
Let's be clear: Real-world science is about getting answers. People
study science so they can get the answers in a reasonably cost-effective
way. Remember the proverb:
Sometimes a few days of doing quick-and-dirty experiments can
save you from a couple hours of studying the literature.
With rare exceptions, real-world science is not done for the
entertainment
of an audience. As a working scientist, you are allowed to spend a small
part of the day entertaining your co-workers ... but not to the point
where it interferes with getting the job done.
For that matter, the same rule applies to teaching. It is important to
keep the class entertained ... but not to the point where it interferes
with learning the material.
The arrogance and stuffiness shown on this list is a good reason why
students are bored to tears with "science".
I'm not in favor of arrogance or stuffiness ... but I still think that
real-world physics is far and away the best motivation for learning
physics.
-- People play golf for entertainment, but even then, having a clue about
the physics of golf makes it more entertaining, not less.
-- Ditto for baseball.
-- Private pilots fly for personal enjoyment or for practical purposes or
both. In any case, having a clue about the physics makes flying safer
*and* more fun *and* more efficient *and* easier to learn.
-- There have been a couple hundred Mythbusters episodes, and almost
every one involves some sort of real-world physics question.
-- et cetera
Most importantly, it pays to learn to THINK, because thinking skills are
portable. If you learn about angular momentum in connection with the golf
swing, you can apply that to the baseball swing ... and then apply it to
the killer cable snap and thousands of other things.
It just cracks me up when people say "we didn't study that in school".
Well
maybe you didn't study cable snaps in school, but you should have learned
how to think. You should have learned how to figure things out. You
should
have learned about impulse and momentum and angular momentum and symmetry
...
which is all you need to figure out why the Mythbusters cable snap
experiment
did not achieve the goal they had set for themselves. What they did was
OK
as a /preliminary/ experiment, but it didn't answer all the questions, so
obviously they needed to do additional experiments.
I pains me to read the hokey end-of-chapter problems in the textbooks.
No wonder it's hard to motivate students to work on such problems. This
is sad and quite unnecessary, given that there are so many well-motivated
real-world problems we could work on instead.
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