Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of ‘Mythbusters’
Former special-effects artists Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman are the co-hosts of “Mythbusters,” Discovery Channel’s popular science program that tests whether everyday assumptions, conspiracy theories and urban legends can hold up through rigorous experimentation. Savage, 42, and Hyneman, 53, recently spoke with The Times by phone from the Bay Area, where most episodes are produced.
What are you guys working on today?
Jamie: Well, we’re out at a runway in Alameda. We’re testing whether a slushy drink thrown out of the window of one car going at highway speeds, when it hits a car going in the other direction, does it actually bust the windshield and potentially kill somebody?
And what’s the verdict?
Adam: We’ve just come to a conclusion on the slushy cups themselves and are about to move on to cans of soda, which we think will be a much more lethal projectile. And if they’re not sufficiently lethal, we have a machine to fire them at lethal speeds.
Jamie: We haven’t clocked it yet, but it’s somewhere subsonic, I can say that. It’s like a shoulder-mounted thing that’s really cool.
How did you come up with the idea to test this myth?
Adam: This actually came from a news story we got about a woman supposedly injured by a cup of soda.
Jamie: It’s a perfect story for us, because it was a Styrofoam cup, for crying out loud!
You guys are famous for elaborate setups for your experiments, such as when you investigated which falls to Earth first, a bullet dropped or a bullet fired. The weapon’s firing and the bullet’s release had to be simultaneous.
Adam: That in itself took about 13 hours to achieve. The thing that is really delivering for us is the high-speed camera, which is one of the most precise and beautiful tools we’ve ever used. It’s a digital camera that shoots in HD resolution at almost 7,000 frames per second. It can quite easily stop a bullet completely cold, perfectly still and in-frame for us.
The show is in its seventh season now. How has it changed?
Jamie: It’s not like we showed up and were cast into this series ready to go. We had some skills beforehand. But the kind of understanding we have of the way the world works now, it’s really been mind-opening. The show is reflecting that.
But not all the shows can count as groundbreaking scientific inquiry, right? Some seem like just for the heck of it.
Adam: We’ve got one coming up called “Spy Car,” which asks, does the standard movie triumvirate of oil slick, smoke screen and spreading tacks from the back of your car actually help prevent people from chasing you?
Do you have a Holy Grail myth, some cherished experiment you haven’t been able to test yet?
Adam: We started talking a couple years ago about doing Leonardo da Vinci’s screw-type helicopter. And that led quickly to a discussion about us building a successfully flying, human-powered helicopter. This is something we’d like to do on the show. There’s a prize for human-powered helicoptering, and nobody’s won it yet. We’d like to take a crack at that.
Are you worried about running out of myths to test?
Adam: We’re on something like the 170th hour of “Mythbusters,” and we’ve still got a list of about 60 myths lined up through next season, and about another 100 or so on top of that. As far as we can see, there’s absolutely no shortage.
How often do professional scientists contact you to criticize your experiments?
Jamie: We hear about it from time to time. It’s wonderful to get feedback. It means someone’s actually thinking hard about what we’re doing.
Adam: They so appreciate that we’re clearly demonstrating the scientific method. And that science is actually a deeply creative endeavor -- messy and complicated and ultimately, super-fun.
Have you ever felt like doing a certain experiment means risking your life?
Adam: Every day. We tested whether a sonic boom could break a glass window in your house. We’d gotten the cooperation of the Blue Angels team. So I was flying in the back of an F/A-18 Hornet. Those guys, because they fly so precisely, don’t use G-suits to keep from passing out. As part of their training, they work out in the gym for two hours every single day so they can use only the muscles in their body they need to keep blood in their heads so they can stay conscious and fly the plane. I am so far from that kind of shape that I’m amazed I held out as long as I did. I threw up, like, seven times. In-flight, by using the barf bags and stuffing them in the pockets of my flight suit. Given all the things I’ve done on the show that made me queasy or nauseous -- like scuba diving with sharks in South Africa or riding the “Vomit Comet” aircraft -- this was the only one in which throwing up or passing out did not detract from the experience at all. I was having fun the whole time.
Jamie: That’s why Adam was sent up. We knew he was going to throw up. It makes for good TV.
