Mythbusters, gone

James Meigs has an op-ed piece in The New York Times about one of Rico's favorite shows:

When the reality television show MythBusters debuted on the Discovery Channel in 2003, its producers were not on a mission to transform science and education in America. They just wanted to entertain. In each episode, the hosts would try to debunk or confirm a few classic urban legends. Could a penny dropped off the Empire State Building really kill a person? Could eating a poppy-seed bagel actually make you test positive for heroin? The producers cast two San Francisco-based special-effects artists, Jamie Hyneman (photo, top, left) and Adam Savage, as hosts. The show was a surprise hit, pulling in as many as twenty million viewers a season, and it helped changed our culture.
Two weeks ago, Hyneman and Savage announced that the fourteenth season of MythBusters, which begins in January, will be its last. It was a worthy run. Over the course of 248 episodes and nearly three thousand separate experiments, MythBusters taught a whole generation how science works and why it matters.
Americans have worried about the state of science literacy in our country since the days of Sputnik. Educators who want to improve our prospects in this field would do well to take a few pages from the MythBusters handbook.
When the show started, the image of science and engineering in mainstream culture was at a low ebb. NASA’s Apollo glory days were long past, and the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated on re-entry just days after the show’s premiere episode. There was no leading scientist able to connect with the general public the way the astronomer Carl Sagan had before his death in 1996. Even Bill Nye the Science Guy, had been dropped from the airwaves. And popular sci-fi movies of the era— The Matrix and Minority Report— depicted science and technology leading us to bleak, dystopian futures.
Academic interest in science was in similar decline: barely twenty percent of college freshmen were signing up for majors in science, technology, engineering and math, known as STEM fields — continuing a long downward trend.
MythBusters helped reverse that trend, not by gussying science up, but by taking it seriously. “You can’t underestimate the power of television to give young people a lens to see science through,” says the materials scientist and STEM evangelist Anissa Ramirez. “MythBusters helped viewers feel empowered to participate.”
Too often, science is presented as a body of established facts to be handed down to obedient students. But MythBusters isn’t about facts, it’s about process: for every myth, the team has to figure out how to test the claim, then construct an experiment, carry out the tests, and analyze the results. (Penny: false. Poppy seeds: true.) Every episode is an object lesson in the scientific method. Scientists had often been depicted in entertainment, but rarely had audiences seen people actually doing science.
Obviously, experiments staged for television can’t have the rigor of peer-reviewed lab work. But MythBusters captures the underlying mind-set of science. At a time when “skepticism” too often means rejecting any ideas one finds politically unpalatable, MythBusters provides a compelling example of real scientific skepticism, the notion that nothing can be held true until it is confirmed by experimentation.
It’s also good television. MythBusters is relentlessly entertaining, partly because it channels the underlying suspense of science itself: The hosts don’t know how an experiment is going to turn out any more than the audience does. And almost every test requires that the team build some sort of contraption: for example, a miniature Hindenburg to test the claim that it was the burning of the dirigible’s paint, not its hydrogen, that destroyed the airship.
“The public doesn’t often associate science with being deeply creative,” Hyneman recently said. “We have pointed out how fun and creative and thought-provoking science and experimentation can be.” The duo constantly hears from adult fans who were inspired by the show and are now working in science or engineering. “They say, ‘You guys got me through high school physics,’ ” Savage said.
The MythBusters’ delight in gonzo engineering also helped inspire the rise of the modern class of tinkerers known as “makers”. When the show began, the idea that average people could build their own complex gadgets was a fringe notion at best. Today, more than four hundred thousand students worldwide gather to compete in FIRST Robotics competitions. Thousands of adults and kids attend Maker Faire festivals to show off their quirky inventions. “I feel really lucky that MythBusters coincided with the whole DIY movement and contributed to it,” Savage said. “I mean you’ve got ten-year-old girls building robots now!”
MythBusters didn’t do all this alone, of course. American culture is embracing its inner nerd on many fronts today. The cult of Steve Jobs and our fascination with tech start-ups have played a part. So have fictional television shows like CSI and The Big Bang Theory. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has stepped into Carl Sagan’s shoes, and The Martian, which its star, Matt Damon, calls “a love letter to science,” is one of the biggest films of 2015.
Best of all, a study conducted by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles found that the number of college freshmen enrolling in STEM majors has climbed nearly fifty percent since 2005. If a few more kids today want to grow up to be Elon Musk or settle on Mars or cure cancer, we have Jamie and Adam partly to thank.
As MythBusters moves on to its afterlife of cable reruns, let’s hope the show’s example continues to resonate with educators and programmers. Science doesn’t need to be cleaned up or prettified to be accessible; in fact, the best way to learn it is by getting your hands dirty.

Rico says he'll miss the guys when they're gone...