The Best Science Show on Television?

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
ALAMEDA, Calif. — “This is where we blow stuff up.”

Jamie Hyneman — who, to be honest, did not actually use the word “stuff” — stood in front of a two-story, blast-resistant ruin of a building at the back of the former Alameda Point Naval Air Station.

Mr. Hyneman and his colleague, Adam Savage, are the hosts of “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel. It may be the best science program on television, in no small part because it does not purport to be a science program at all. What “Mythbusters” is best known for, to paraphrase Mr. Hyneman, is blowing stuff up. And banging stuff together. And setting stuff on fire. The two men do it for fun and ratings, of course. But in a subtle and goofily educational way, they commit mayhem for science’s sake.

As the name implies, the program tests what the creators call myths, hypotheses taken from folklore, history, movies, the Internet and urban legends. Can a skunk’s smell can be neutralized with tomato juice? Did the Confederacy come up with a two-stage rocket that could strike Washington from Richmond, Va.? Can a sunken ship be raised with Ping-Pong balls? Could a car stereo be so loud that it would blow out the windows?

Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage, who produce Hollywood special effects and gadgets for a living, come up with ways to challenge each thesis and build experiments with a small crew. If fire and explosions or, say, rotting pig carcasses happen to be involved, well, that’s entertainment.

What they came here to do on a clear and crisp October morning, with San Francisco posing magnificently across the bay, was set the Hindenburg on fire. Three Hindenburgs, actually, to address a debate over what actually doomed the hydrogen-filled zeppelin on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, N.J. Hydrogen, of course, is highly flammable and was the obvious culprit in the disaster.

But a counterargument had arisen that the doping paint used to toughen the craft’s skin of fabric contained aluminum powder and other materials that combined to resemble an explosive called thermite. That, the theory goes, made the fabric as combustible as rocket fuel.

To test the theory, the “Mythbusters” crew built three 1/50-scale models over three days. Two had re-creations of the skin on the original craft, and a third — well, we’ll get to that one.

The three members of the “build team,” Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara, were not on the set the day of the shoot, but a small video team was. Cameras captured the action from several angles. Mr. Savage had also placed one camera on the ground, facing up toward the mini-blimp, with tiny models of people placed nearby to mimic the newsreel scenes.

It was time to make a disaster happen. Mr. Hyneman stood by an open door of the building to manipulate a long pole with a gas torch that he used to ignite the mini-zeppelin, which was more than 10 feet long, hanging inside. Mr. Savage pinballed between peeking through the door and sitting under a canopy outside watching video monitors.

The first blimp, not filled with hydrogen, burned slowly at its tail end for a minute and a half and then foomph! Fire raced along its length in just a few seconds. Mr. Savage shouted, “Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going!”

“Say it again,” the sound man said, moving in closer.

“Oh, my God, look how fast it’s going through the top!” Mr. Savage exclaimed again. And then, as if forgetting that the camera was still rolling, added softly, “It’s so beautiful.”

After just two minutes, the spidery frame had been denuded, and acrid smoke poured from the open doors of the building. On the monitors, the replay eerily recalled the old newsreel footage.

It might not have turned out that way, of course. Part of what makes the show compelling for so many viewers is its unpredictability. “Once you get it going, whatever it does is what it does,” Mr. Hyneman said.

But, he said, “Whether we get what we expected or not, any result is a good result — even if it’s that we’re idiots.”

“Failure,” Mr. Savage said, “is always an option.”

Their delight in discovery for its own sake is familiar to most scientists, who welcome any result because it either confirms or debunks a hypothesis. That sense of things can be corrupted when grants or licensing deals are on the line. But the Mythbusters get paid whether their experiments succeed or fail.

The show, which has been on the air since October 2003, may be wacky, but Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage employ thinking and processes that are grounded in scientific method. They come up with a hypothesis and test it methodically. After research and experimentation, they might determine that they have “busted” a myth or confirmed it, or they might simply deem it “plausible” but not proved.

It is the kind of logical system of evidence-based conclusions that scientists understand but that others can sometimes find difficult to grasp. And so “Mythbusters” fans say the show has hit on a great way of teaching the process of scientific discovery.

David Wallace, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T., praises the program for “getting people interested in engineering, technology and how things work.”

Dr. Wallace has sparred in a friendly way with Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage over Archimedes’ “death ray,” sunlight reportedly focused with mirrors by the ancient Greeks and used to burn ships in a harbor. The Mythbusters declared the death ray “busted” in 2004 after they were unable to start a fire with their version; Dr. Wallace and his class said they proved it plausible by burning a mock-up ship in 2005.

The “Mythbusters” group invited Dr. Wallace and his students to California to revisit the question under more rigorous conditions for an episode that ran earlier this year. Dr. Wallace’s group failed to ignite a real boat in the water at a distance of 150 feet, but did get it to ignite at 75 feet.

“I don’t think the ruling on a given myth is all that important,” Dr. Wallace said. “It is more about being curious and trying to figure things out.”

Another fan, Eric Sherman, a salesman in Chino Hills, Calif., said he used the show to help his children, ages 5 to 9, “value the scientific method and value thinking skills.”

Recently, when the children came home troubled because a playmate had told them she had a ghost in her room, Mr. Sherman turned the conversation into a lesson. “What would the Mythbusters do?” he asked.

Mr. Hyneman, however, insists that he and the “Mythbusters” team “don’t have any pretense of teaching science.” His wife, he noted, is a science teacher, and he knows how difficult that profession is. “If we tried to teach science,” he said, “the shows probably wouldn’t be successful.”

“If people take away science from it,” Mr. Hyneman said, “it’s not our fault.” But if the antics inspire people to dig deeper into learning, he said, “that’s great.”

Science teachers know a good thing when they see one, however: Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage were invited to speak at the annual convention of the National Science Teachers Association in March, and the California Science Teachers Association named Mr. Savage and Mr. Hyneman honorary lifetime members in October.

Back at the former air station, hydrogen was flowing through the second mini-zeppelin, and what happened left little doubt about the original disaster. The flaming gas blew the top out of the zeppelin and flowed upward in a sight even more chillingly reminiscent of the Lakehurst newsreels. The burn took half as long as the first. The hydrogen also appeared to have raised the temperature of the fire, causing more thermite reactions — seen as brilliant white sparks — than in the first test.

“The hydrogen’s helping,” Mr. Savage said. “To say that the hydrogen played no significant role is idiotic.”

He and Mr. Hyneman, standing next to a charred frame, quickly improvised dialogue for the cameras over a half-dozen takes. As far as they were concerned, the myth that the paint alone caused the tragedy was disproved, not just because of the appearance of the blaze but also because of its timing.

“It’s busted,” Mr. Savage said of the myth. Mr. Hyneman added, however, that “the cloth did have something to do with it.”

Mr. Hyneman would be instantly recognizable to anyone who watches the show. He is a study in manly fussiness, with the brushy mustache and the beret, the stylish eyeglasses and the immaculate white shirt over a black long-sleeve T-shirt, and the heavy work boots. His puckish colleague wore a leather jacket over a black T-shirt that read “Am I missing an eyebrow?” — a comment he made in an early episode after wayward pyrotechnics singed him.

They are buddy-movie mismatched, the straight man and the goofy guy, Superego and Id, Martin and Lewis. On the wall at Mr. Hyneman’s company, M5 Industries, a sign expresses his own forcefully precise and orderly nature: “Clean up or die.”

“When we work together, he’s generally leaving a wake of destruction in his path,” Mr. Hyneman grumbled. “Considering it’s my shop and my equipment, it’s irritating.”

They are, in fact, so different that Mr. Hyneman said, “We don’t even like each other.” Although they have worked together for 13 years, they don’t socialize: “We don’t hang out with each other any more than we have to.”

At the same time, he said, their differences allow them to approach each problem from a different perspective. “I find myself feeling out of balance or awkward without him there to bounce things off of,” he said.

The third Hindenburg experiment would theoretically test the notion that the original craft’s fabric had been treated with a thermite-like substance. The crew had mixed about 15 pounds of actual thermite, which is highly explosive, into the fabric.

For this test, no one was allowed near the building. Yellowish brown smoke billowed out and tore at throats and burned eyes. On the monitors, the flames were blindingly bright. White sparks were thrown far and wide. It was all over in moments.

The purpose of the third burn — aside from an excuse to have a truly awesome conflagration — was to suggest what the Hindenburg might have looked like if the chemicals used to coat its skin had actually been thermite instead of a chemical cousin. “The skin of the Hindenburg was not coated in 100 pounds of thermite,” Mr. Hyneman said. Mr. Savage watched the replay again. “Dude, there’s no doubt that does not look like the Hindenburg.”

The sun was setting as they finished the day’s shoot. Mr. Savage’s face was smudged, and both men seemed exhausted. Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage set fire to the remaining tub of thermite paint for the cameras, and then the crew packed up.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Hyneman said that he sometimes worried about “glorifying explosions,” which could send the wrong message to young and impressionable viewers. “If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t be blowing stuff up,” he said.

Mr. Savage appeared behind him. “But then we wouldn’t have a show,” he said with a cackle, and darted away.