Ever wondered why toast always seems to land butter-side down? Or whether you could really kill a man with a thrown playing card? Maybe you just want to see something explode?
For over a decade, fans have tuned into the show MythBusters to watch mad scientists Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage put these and other wild myths to the test, typically with high explosives and duct tape. Now, a new show has touched down in Edmonton that lets you try myth-busting too.
MythBusters: the Explosive Exhibition opened Friday at the Telus World of Science in Edmonton. The travelling show features hundreds of props and videos from the award-winning program and myths guests can test in hands-on experiments.
“Each one is based off a myth we can test further from what they did on the show,” said exhibit designer Geoffrey Curley, and each is a real experiment with different outcomes depending on how you manipulate the variables.
The original MythBusters show ran from 2003 to 2016. In it, Hyneman, Savage, and their co-hosts performed some 2,950 experiments to test 1,054 myths, misconceptions and legends, utilizing some 22.25 tons of explosives and about 83 miles of duct tape in the process.
Those experiments often featured custom-built experimental devices, many of which are featured in this now six-year-old exhibit.
“There’s actually a moment in the (TV) series when you can see when we took everything,” Curley said, as a whole bunch of props vanish from the show’s set.
Fans can get up close with a jet pack, fart collector, champagne Gatling gun, gas-powered chicken cannon and a working ultralight plane made of duct-tape. All these improbable devices were used on the show to test myths, and were often left scorched and mangled in the process.
Curley said the MythBusters crew continues to update the exhibit each year. New for the Edmonton show is a video clip of the crew testing dust explosions (which involved detonating a silo using dairy creamer powder) and new experiments with water bottle launchers and a hall of mirrors.
The exhibit, like the show itself, uses everyday objects to let people get hands-on with science, said Jennifer Bawden, science director at the Telus World of Science.
“You get to see the scientific method in action.”
Science behind the myths
Those hands-on experiments often have surprising results.
One station asks guests to see if they can throw a playing card with lethal force, for example, and features tips from professional card-tosser Rick Jay, who can lob a card at 145 km/h.
The lethality of a card toss comes down to velocity, technique and centripetal force, Curley said. Although the MythBusters found that you couldn’t kill someone with a card – not even with a 241 km/h card-tossing machine – you could cause a paper cut. Curley said a skilled card-lobber could definitely embed a card into the foam target set up in the exhibit.
“People spend a long time there perfecting their skills,” Curley said.
Bawden was setting up tables and dishes at the Tablecloth Chaos station, which examines the classic trick of pulling a cloth off a table without disturbing the dishes on it. (The MythBusters used a banquet table and a motorcycle in their test of this trick.) Guests can mix, match and stack the plates, and experiment with different cloth types, angles and velocities.
While there were a lot of clattering cups at the exhibit Thursday, a few guests did manage to pull the trick off.
Paul Kane chemistry teacher Michael Ng does this trick regularly during his science demonstrations, and said that it all comes down to inertia.
“Sir Isaac Newton says that an object at rest remains at rest until a force is exerted upon it,” he explained.
Here, the force of you pulling the cloth is transferred to the plates by friction. If the tablecloth is rough or your pull is slow, enough force transfers to drag the plates along, causing them to tumble, as he unintentionally demonstrated. Use a smooth cloth and pull fast, and the dishes stay still.
“You want everything to be so smooth that the object remains at rest,” Ng said.
Ng said you could make this trick easier if you use heavy plates or add weight (such as water) to the cups, as mass increases inertia. He recommends against having cutlery on the table, as that could lead to a flying-knife situation.
One of the more elaborate stations in the exhibit examines the buttered-toast myth by having guests drop simulated toast from various heights in different ways. Guests soon learn that the speed, height and spin of the toast all come into play, and that toast does not, in fact, always land butter-side down.
But neither is it a 50/50 chance. In 2001, Aston University physicist Robert Matthews had about 1,000 kids perform over 21,000 toast-drops and record the results. The toast was either buttered or marked with a “B” on one side (to see if the weight of the butter mattered) and dropped from a plate held at waist level.
The students determined that the toast landed butter-side down 62 per cent of the time and “B” side down 58 per cent of the time when dropped from waist height, but just 47 per cent of the time when dropped from 2.5 metres.
In an email interview, Matthews explained that this is due to physics: when toast slides off a typical waist-high plate or table, it does not have enough time to complete a full somersault and land butter-side up again. The only way the toast would have enough time for a full flip would be if we changed the force of gravity or were more than three metres tall – neither of which is likely to happen. As he wrote in his 1995 paper on this phenomenon, “all human-like organisms are destined to experience the ‘tumbling-toast’ manifestation of Murphy’s Law because of the value of the fundamental constants in our universe.”
Matthews did find two ways to prevent butter-down-ness that you can test at the exhibition. If you swipe the toast forward as it falls of the table or yank the plate out from under it downward and backward, you minimize the amount of gravitationally induced torque applied to the toast and stop it from spinning face down.
Everyday myth-busting
MythBusters is still on the air through reruns and its spin-off show, MythBusters Junior. Ng said he sometimes uses clips from the show in his lessons.
Shows like MythBusters boost science literacy and encourage people to think about what is and isn’t true about the world, and how they can test claims they hear in the media, Bawden said.
MythBusters shows people that they can do science even if they don’t have a lab or years of post-secondary education, Curley said.
“If you’re curious and have a question, you can answer it through science.”
The MythBusters exhibit runs until Labour Day. Visit telusworldofscienceedmonton.ca for details.
