- Spaceships would never explode in a loud fiery blast.
- Doctors would look like real people.
- Stegosaurus would never encounter Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Let’s see how many we can come up with together…
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Chris Mooney is a 2009-2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and the author of three books, The Republican War on Science, Storm World, and Unscientific America. For more information see his bio and events.
Sheril Kirshenbaum is a research associate at Duke University and co-author of Unscientific America. Sometimes she's a classicist, radio jock, or congressional staffer. For more information, visit her website.
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April 7th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Mutation would not produce superheroes.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Light beer would never be more drinkable than it’s full strength counterpart.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Eating a fast food burger would not make someone more attractive to the opposite sex.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:25 am
If CSI: Miami runs for a few more years, there will be no more Miami because everybody will be dead but the police.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Mythbusters uses controls in nearly every case.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Space fighters would not turn like airplanes.
Accidents would be actual accidents (not caused by aliens or super intelligent evil people)
The detective would call the patrol car at the other end of town instead of racing through downtown traffic him/herself. I know this is not science just common sense.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Nobody could dodge a weapon that shot laser beams. Or successfully bear children with a partner from a different planet.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Replace the Mythbusters panel with biology being unstoppable. A shaped charge, an explosively formed penetrator (EFP), or a depleted uranium long rod penetrator does not care what it hits – it goes in. An A-10 Thunderbolt II with its 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger Gatling gun stops all meat – gorillas, dinosaurs, turtles, moths. (Inefficient against Anopheles mosquitoes and Caulerpa taxifolia. Untested against Enviro-whiners, social engineers, advocates, and carbon credit arbitrageurs.)
An 8″ diameter EFP tosses a Mach 6, 3100 gram copper slug. An M2 .50 Cal Heavy Barrel machine gun fires a Mach 3, 50 gram bullet. The former’s kinetic energy is 250X the latter’s.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Computer hacking would be a completely mundane and tedious exercise taking weeks as opposed to frantically pounding on a keyboard to look intensive. Thank you NCIS for your many giggles.
April 7th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
I don’t get the Mythbusters crack. Please see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythbusters#Experiment_methodology . I don’t know how many “data points” they should try and gather, since it is difficult and expensive to try to reproduce the conditions for each myth multiple times. Also, I controls are not appropriate for many of the myths they try to bust.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Thanks to Castle: NYPD Missing Person’s is actually a set of paper files.
April 8th, 2009 at 4:44 am
but wait Sheril you are a tv scientist!
April 8th, 2009 at 5:43 am
That’s excellent – who’s the artist?
My sister and a colleague absolutely hate MythBusters because “it’s not science”. I love MythBusters because it’s good mindless fun with a little reality thrown in. Admittedly anyone who thinks MythBusters is a fair representation of scientific investigation is in for disappointment; on the other hand, production costs would go orbital if you got the right people involved to make sure everything would stand up to the scrutiny of scientists. These folks get concepts working in a fairly short period of time (and that’s what cinema props people do); some of the simplest ideas they play with would take me close to 3 months to do in a rigorous (and possibly not as fun) manner.