Four bad messages from a Mythbusters episode

I had high hopes for the Mythbusters when they started, but these hopes were quickly squashed. Now in its last season, the Mythbusters have become a perfect representation of the 'people who "love" science, as long as they don't have to learn any.'

The recent episode "Driven to destruction" had four clear, though not explicit, messages; all of them were anti-science messages. Here they are:


I - Don't bother checking existing knowledge or consulting field experts

Adam wants to lift a car using only the suction of a vacuum cleaner to attach the car to the crane. He builds some suction cups and then places them on the car, without any consideration of the distribution of mass (and therefore of the lifting force necessary) in the car.

If Adam had consulted a mechanical engineer (or anyone with enough of an interest in mechanical structures to read a couple of books), he'd have learned that to lift an heterogeneous object using multiple attachment points to distribute the load, one needs to consider the distribution of mass and not just the total mass.

But here, like in most if not all episodes, the Mythbusters spurn extant knowledge and actual expertise and decide to pretend that science is 'make stuff up as you go.'


II - Calculations are boring, but show pretty charts (and formulas)

Adam's rig doesn't lift the car, it just creates attachment. Computing the attachment force is a simple matter: the total force is the maximum sustainable pressure of the system (vacuum cleaner motor fighting the atmospheric pressure on the output side, seals fighting it on the contact boundaries) times the surface of the attachment. This would be simple enough to measure and calculate (and then multiply by an engineering safety factor to account for faults).

Instead we get a chart about "linear relationship," which is true enough for the purposes of lifting the car, but doesn't even show what the calculation is. Also, because of the lack of expertise in how distributed lifting works, the calculations are actually quite dependent on where the attachment points go and therefore not linear at all.  (The point of saying "linear relationship" is to teach the audience yet another identity phrase.)

(There were no formulas in the show itself, but there are several, apparently randomly selected, during the opening credits.)

Note also that in the early part of the show pressure was measured in pounds per square inch, while in the last version of the experiment pressure was measured in millimeters of mercury. No effort was put into explaining how these relate to each other. Because the purpose of the gauge (and of the "measurement" for that matter) is to look and sound scientific without actually making any type of calculation.

"Math is hard," said Barbie the people who "love" science (as long as they don't have to learn any).


III - Experiments don't need controls or replication

As usual, Mythbusters experiments are made without a control condition and run only once. The lack of a control is less important in this episode, as they were really not testing any theories (unless one considers the quality of vacuum cleaner seals a theory), but the lack of replication is problematic.

Adam does make a lot of attempts to lift the car, eventually getting his rig to work. Once. Since there are all sorts of situation variables that aren't fixed, including the speed at which the crane operator lifts the load, that "experiment" needs replication.

Note that here we're not talking about the independent replication that is now debated in science (when team A publishes a result and team B checks that result by replicating the experiment). Independent replication has been the bane of the social sciences, for example. What we're talking about here is to make the car go up more than once.


IV - Change whatever elements of an experiment you want, no problem

When measuring the "force" (in fact the pressure) of the vacuum cleaner in the shop, and for the first few tests, Adam uses a home vacuum cleaner (looks like a Dyson), but later the experiments with the car use a shop vacuum cleaner, which in my experience creates a lot more pressure ("suction" is pressure). Jamie changes the explosive from a plastic explosive to ANFO (ammonia nitrate - fuel oil, a much slower explosive).

For the small-scale experiments to have any relevance to the large-scale experiments, all the elements other than scale should be unchanged. There could be a case for a different explosive if Jamie were trying to scale up the detonation speed, though that's hard to do correctly, but it would have gone in the other direction, using an explosive with higher detonation speed.

(The explosives are rigged by demolition experts, who could probably have taught Jamie how to do the detonation correctly, since it's their expertise; but that wouldn't work with the psychological premises of the show: that the Mythbusters are experts and experts don't ask for help -- both totally wrong.)


None of these things matter

To the audience, that is. Because their audience is full of people who "love" science, as long as they don't have to learn any. And they want explosions, words that they can use to impress equally ignorant friends (like stoichiometry), and the warm glow of looking down upon other people who don't profess "love" for science (but might actually know some).

And for those who believe that the Mythbusters might have some value as a motivator, consider the case of Planet Fitness: a gym where you pretend to work-out and people tell you how great you are doing, therefore preventing you from actually working out at a real gym.

The Mythbusters are the Planet Fitness of science education.

Fed up with "trust us, we're experts" science

Somehow in my lifetime we went from Feyman's idea of science requiring 'a belief in the fallibility of experts,' to a caste system where science experts must be trusted without question, and acolytes jump on anyone who dares ask anything.

The trigger event for this rant was the Mythbusters Breaking Bad Special. In particular, the test of the hydrofluoric acid disposal of a body in a bathtub that ends up with a big hole on the floor and ceiling of Jesse's home. (Season 1, Episode 2, "Cat's in the bag.")

(Big Breaking Bad fan here, and still grudgingly a fan of the Mythbusters.)

First off, the Mythbusters test the effect of the 100ml of hydrofluoric acid on a number of samples of the materials involved (meat, wood, drywall, iron, steel, linoleum), all of the same size. Yes, size, not appropriate mass computed from molar calculation. Apparently no one thought of asking a chemist (though one is present to run the experiment) about mass balance and stoichiometry. 

After they fail to dissolve these objects with the apparently arbitrarily chosen volume of hydrofluoric acid, the Mythbusters move on to replicate the scene in the show with a different solvent.

This is the point when I really lose it: they say that the solution to the body-disposal problem is to use sulfuric acid and a secret sauce.

A. Secret. Sauce.

Because knowledge should only be held by experts?! Say whaaa?

This is what science entertainment teaches its audience: if you're not an expert, you should not expect full information: "Trust us, we know what's going on, and you'll get to see the result on TV, so it's real." Of course this trains audiences to (a) accept TV as the authority on who's an expert; (b) believe in experts' statements without requiring proof or independent verification; and (c) think of science as something beyond the comprehension of the audience member, and therefore not to be questioned by him or her.

Yes, I get their legalistic "we're not here to teach people how to dispose of bodies," but it's ridiculous: acquiring the large quantities of acid necessary would be more suspicious than a number of other ways that can easily be found on the interwebs or on Bones or Dexter. Joe Pesci explains the traditional approach at the beginning of Casino: "dig the hole before you whack the guy, so you don't have to dig it with the body out in the open."

(The secret sauce is hydrogen peroxide, another chemical that would really raise eyebrows -- FBI and DHS eyebrows -- if purchased in quantity, since it is used for improvised explosive devices. Also, really really really temperamental chemical.)

Then I remembered the Mythbusters had done this before, in the thermite episode, for which they blurred the names of the igniter reagents. FYI,  to ignite thermite you drop glycerol on a mound of potassium permanganate on top of the thermite; though you can simply use a long-neck torch, like they did on, oh irony, Breaking Bad.

When I was a kid, I liked chemistry almost as much as electronics, and this is the kind of thing we got to play with before the world became full of Sitzpinkler. Do they even sell chemistry sets for children anymore? If not, where is the next generation of chemists and chemical engineers going to come from? Chemistry can be dangerous, but bringing up an entire generation ignorant of it is terminally stupid. But I digress...

Back to the main problem: It has become acceptable to make the argument that the audience should trust the experts on faith, since the technical stuff is either too difficult or too dangerous or too easily misused by the non-initiated.

This kind of thinking is more dangerous to science than 10 Tomás de Torquemadas. Because this is the kind of thinking that creates 10,000 Torquemadas, all convinced that they are the paladins of science and all ready to auto-da-fé those whom the experts deem to be the enemies of Science™. Thus quelling dissent and killing the basis of all progress in science.

A lot of people will line up for this; after all there are many people who like the idea and image of science. As long as they don't have to learn any, of course.

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Note: edited on Nov 21st to remove unnecessary detour about "skeptics."

Thoughts inspired by a science joke

Another day, another science joke. Not a very funny one, but enlightening.

When I say "science joke," I mean one that involves a modicum of science knowledge. Which makes this yet another post against the scientistologists that are all in favor of science as long as they don't have to learn any. They like the idea and the image of science, but are not willing to do the work necessary to learn it.

Last sunday I tweeted: According to my alarm clock, the computer & phone spent two hours moving at almost 90% of speed of light. That's one explanation.

Since that was the end of Daylight Savings Time, what that tweet says is that clocks which get a synchronization signal from the internet were one hour behind those that I have to reset manually. The twist is that I calculated what speed would compress time 1:2, $v = 0.8660254 c$, and included that in the joke.

(By the way, this time compression is an example of the twins "paradox," which is not paradoxical at all.)

As for the people who "love science" (as long as they don't have to learn any), well, many of them have a vague notion that I was referring to relativity, but no idea whether the 90% number was right, wrong, or random. Science is something they believe in, without actually knowing any of the details.

More and more people are falling into this trap of believing in science as opposed to actually learning it. That is a very bad trend in a technology-dependent society.

My phone is just as smart as you guys!

Dunning-Kruger Effect, the internet is your multiplier.

Anyone can search for anything, which makes knowing what to search for and how to interpret the results more important than ever. The comoditization of information increases the value of knowledge.

Early on in the most recent episode of The Big Bang Theory (season 7, episode 5, "The Workplace Proximity" *), Amy, Bernadette, and Penny are in Penny's apartment drinking wine and talking about Amy's temporary move to Caltech:

Amy: "I'm leading a study to see if deficiency of the monoamine oxydase enzyme leads to paralyzing fear in monkeys"

[Bernadette lets slip that she might have done that research with death row convicts, which she quickly denies because it would have been unethical.]

Penny: "Not many people know this, but the monoamine oxydase [mispronounced as "oxidize"] enzyme was discovered by a woman, Mary Bernheim.

[Bernadette and Amy are stunned.]

Penny: "That's right. My phone is just as smart as you guys."

And this captures a common confusion between knowledge and information. Note the pathologies illustrated in that vignette:

1. Who discovered MAO is irrelevant for the work Amy will be doing. Like Penny, many people pluck some vaguely related fact from the internet to interject into a discussion, in the illusion that they will appear knowledgeable. This behavior is becoming more and more common, especially with smartphones, but knowledge is a lot more than a simple collection of facts.

2. Penny searches for MAO because someone else brought up the topic. Without a framework of knowledge to integrate facts, people who depend on search don't know what to search for. In other words, the input for a meaningful search requires knowledge.

3. Even if Penny found useful MAO information, for example the mechanism by which it catalyzes the oxidation of monoamines and affects mood, she wouldn't be able to interpret the biochemistry and neuroscience involved. In other words the output of the search only gets meaning through knowledge.

Yes, I understand it's a joke. But this attitude that learning substantive material is passé, made unnecessary by the existence of search engines — an attitude that sadly can be found even among educators — is corrupting, corrosive, and counterproductive.

Without knowledge, information is useless. More people making knowledge-poor searches leads to more random facts being flung haphazardly into discussions; this makes having the knowledge to select and interpret the important facts more valuable than before.

Knowledge is power, the power to use information. Pity so few people know that.

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* Even though the general arc of the show has become a soap opera, there are still some good jokes in each episode, and the final joke in this one is among the best.

Digging too deeply into a Heisenberg (Physics not crystal meth) joke

Some days ago I saw and retweeted this joke:

Police officer: "Sir, do you realize you were going 67.58 MPH?
Werner Heisenberg: "Oh great. Now I'm lost."

Ok, it's a funny joke, provided you have a passing acquaintance with basic physics.

But here's my problem: a lot of people who kinda-sorta understand that joke have no idea what's really behind it. And that's a problem I've had for a while now with the "science fanclub that cannot do basic science" as I call them. (The people who think that Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman is a physics book and like to watch soap opera biographies of scientists, heavy on the drama, light on the actual science.)

[Added later] My problem with these people is that they perceive science as something that comes from authority and must not be questioned or further investigated by others. For example, they "know" that the position and the velocity of an elementary particle cannot be jointly determined with arbitrary precision; but when pressed about how they know that, they say something about "Cosmos" or mention a Richard Dawkins book (which of course would not cover this); they behave as acolytes to those they recognize as high priests of science, who – presumably – are anointed by a Council of Wise Ones. That's precisely the opposite of what gave science its success, the idea that anyone can question received wisdom and experiment or observation are the ultimate arbiters of correctness. [End of addition.]

A simplified form of Heisenberg's inequality, good enough for our purposes, is

$\qquad \Delta p \, \Delta x \ge h $

Going by orders of magnitude alone, assuming that the mass of Heisenberg plus car is in the order of 1000 kg, and noting that the speed is given to a precision of 0.01 mi/h, an order of magnitude of 10 m/s, with $h \approx 10^{-34}$ Js, we get a $\Delta x$ of the order of

$\qquad \Delta x  \approx \frac{ 10^{-34} }{10 000} = 10^{-38}$ m.

That's a lot of precision to consider oneself lost. For comparison, the width of a typical human hair is in the order of 10-100 micrometers, or $10^{-5}$ to $10^{-4}$ m.

Yes, these numbers show how stupid it would be to use Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for macroscopic observations. That's the joke; the fact that many members of the science-fanclub have no idea of the magnitudes involved but like to lord their science-fandom over others is part of my irritation.

I see this all the time in my job, with people who can't write Bayes's formula talking loudly about graphical models (should really be graphal models, BTW, since they are based on graphs, not graphics).