Mythbusters

I enjoy watching the show Mythbusters. But many times, the experiments they do are absurd. With a little bit of scientific knowledge, many (most?) of the myths they test could be dismissed without any experiment at all. For example, consider one from an episode I watched a couple of days ago. The question was whether or not you can curve a bullet around an obstacle and hit a target behind said obstacle by swinging your arm about while you shoot. In the parlance of billiards, this would be known as adding "English" to the bullet. This video shows the idea:



It's absurd of course. Once the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun, it's going to follow a path determined by the bullet's exit velocity (more or less). Your swinging arm may effect that exit velocity slightly, but it's not going to add some magical curve to the bullet's path.

I've often heard that Mythbusters "makes science fun." But the show seems to go out of its way to avoid as much science as possible. How about working in something about Newton's laws? Maybe it's not necessary, but would it really be so terrible to show an equation or two? I remember at one point in an episode Adam saying that he had done a calculation to determine how much weight to drop on a see-saw in order to apply a certain amount of force. How about showing us how that was done?

That's the problem I have with Mythbusters... the missed opportunities.

Ann says: I would think you'd have more of a chance with a non-rifled gun barrel and something like a round musketball. The spin produced by the rifling of a barrel would far outclass any little english you could manage to get onto the bullet in the fraction of a second the bullet is in the barrel. But a non-rifled barrel wouldn't produce a such a spinning bullet, and you might be able to impart enough spin to change the aerodynamics of the bullet by the teeny-tiniest fraction of a degree.