On this episode of "MythBusters"...
Adam and Jamie are taking silver-screen sounds to task.
We want to see whether these things
make the same sounds in real life that they do in the movies.
Bye-bye.
Yep, are those audio clichés fact or fake?
Ka-boom!
Meanwhile, Kari, Grant, and Tory cast off for science.
This is "blow your own sail" with the full-size boat.
They're testing the physics thought experiment
"is it possible to blow your own sail?"
Come on!
Chaos, mayhem, high-sea high jinks ahoy.
I feel like there might be just a little element of danger here.
Who are the MythBusters?
- Adam Savage... - I'm done with science for today.
- ...and Jamie Hyneman. - Way to go there, buddy.
Between them, more than 30 years of special-effects experience.
Joining them... Grant Imahara...
It's why we can never have anything nice.
- ...Tory Belleci... - I'll try not to let you guys down.
- ...and Kari Byron. - Whoa!
You know, I went to college for this.
They don't just tell the myths.
They put them to the test.
Mythbusters 9x06 - Blow Your Own Sail Sync, corrected by atrn97g - www.addic7ed.com
First up, an audio-myth that Adam's having nightmares over.
Mm. Look at that.
Somebody's left me a present.
Beautiful. Aah!
Looks like I'm gonna have to take care of this myself.
AmericasCardroom.com brings poker back Million Dollar Sunday Tournament every Sunday
Aah!
Bye-bye.
What was that?
- That was our next story. - Really?
'Cause it looked to me like you were trying to kill me.
No, no, no, no.
It sounds like I'm trying to kill you.
I don't get it.
Well, our next story
is about whether the sounds you hear in the movies
are accurate to the real world.
Oh, sounds cool!
Yep, the sounds of Hollywood
are being put under the MythBusters microscope.
To give a story suspense...
add dramatic punch...
or even a real one...
Movie-makers manipulate, massage, and enrich
every single sound effect we hear.
But do these audio clichés bear any resemblance to the real thing?
To find out, Adam and Jamie have got their ears...
...for the sound.
All right, so, if memory serves,
the classic movie sound effects we'll be working with
are things like the punch, the silencer, and explosions.
- And any others we run into along the way. - All right.
And the testing seems to be pretty straightforward.
We punch something, we use a silencer,
we blow something up, and we record those sounds
and compare them to what the movies
generally represent as those sounds.
Let's start with the punch.
Okay.
Fear not, Adam.
There will be no sobering sequel.
Instead, Jamie's reprising the "violence of the hams".
I always like to wear rain gear when I carry around my pigs.
Yep, porky here is stepping up
to take one for the team... again.
And, clearly, Jamie and I are about to start punching this pig,
but in order to compare the sound of our punches
to your classic movie punch, we're going to record it with this...
a directional microphone pointed exactly at the point of impact.
We will hit the pig, record it on this mike,
and we will store it on this computer,
where we will compare it to this...
...the sound of a classic movie punch.
Ohh!
Go at him.
Ohh!
Nice!
- Did that hurt? - A little bit.
I hit my fingers a little wrong.
Considering his hand was unprotected,
Jamie gave it all he could, but the sound...
wasn't exactly silver-screen superhero.
You want a piece of me?
Aah!
We're gonna get hurt if we keep doing it like this.
To avoid hurting themselves,
they have to pull their punches,
limiting the power they can put into them.
And the audio recording... Ohh!
reflects their less-than-action hero efforts.
Aah!
All right, and for comparison, here's the movie punch.
There's no... there's no equivalency at all.
Ohh!
Which leaves the myth reeling, but not yet knocked out.
Yet another use for duct tape.
Next, they're going to add a little action-movie oomph
to try and get a more Hollywood-style sound.
And with his makeshift boxing glove,
Jamie will be able to throw a full-blooded right hook.
But despite pounding the pork appreciably harder,
it's clear the audio still doesn't match up.
It's still nowhere near.
Next up, Kari, Grant, and Tory
set sail for a physics thought experiment.
Okay, now, this is what I'm talking about.
So, can you tell us what we're doing out here?
Yeah, what, are we testing the myth
of "if we take Grant sailing, he's gonna throw up"?
No, but we're actually doing a sailing myth,
so I figured, "why would we be in the blueprint room"
"when we can be out here"?
All right, well, can we get on with it?
Because this is a ticking time bomb.
Okay, well, our next myth
is actually this year's "plane on a conveyer belt."
They call it "blow your own sail."
Ah, that's the one that, if you have a windless day,
if you take a giant fan and blow it into your sail,
you can actually start sailing.
Exactly. But fans say it might not work.
Right. Because of newtonian physics.
All right, well, I think we need to get to the bottom of this one.
Or get sick trying.
Speak for yourself, landlubber.
It's a classic physics fable.
Becalmed in the doldrums, our hero pulls out a fan,
whips up a wind, and, hey, presto... she's blowing her own sail.
But do Newton's laws really mean this myth is dead in the water?
What happens if you take this physics thought experiment
into the real world?
Okay, it's not because I'm prone to getting seasick,
but shouldn't we go back to the shop
and do some small-scale experiment?
What?
Why? I mean, we're here now.
Let's just put a fan on here and go for it.
Well, the problem is, it's not a windless day.
We won't know if we're sailing because of our fan
or because of a change in the wind.
Ah, he's got a good point.
All right, why don't we go back to the shop,
do some small-scale tests,
get some miniature sailboats and some miniature fans,
and find out exactly what's happening before we go full scale?
Yeah, it's probably a good idea.
Grant is looking a little green, isn't he?
So, to avoid Grant's nautical nausea,
it's back to terra firma, where the goal is getting to grips
with the underlying science of the story.
So, this myth is essentially about Newton's laws.
And specifically, his first law, which states that an object
will remain in its current state of motion
unless acted upon by an external force.
Now, in our case, the external object is the boat.
Current state of motion... at rest.
The external force... the wind acts upon the boat
and causes it to move along.
Now, in the case of our sailor...
If this person were able to generate the wind
while sitting on the boat, it's no longer an external force.
They're internal... in the same frame of reference...
so when they blow on it, theoretically, the boat won't move.
And worryingly for the myth,
it's not just Newton's first law making movement unlikely.
So, there is another newtonian principle...
that is the third law of motion, which says that for every action,
there is an equal and opposite reaction.
So, therefore, if the fan is blowing wind into the sail,
it's also pushing the fan backwards.
If this is true, these two forces are gonna cancel each other out,
and this boat's not gonna go anywhere.
It's just gonna stall.
So with two of Newton's laws
lining up to sink this sea-going saga,
the team prepares for a proof-of-concept test...
one that will put the scientific theory into practice.
And while Kari makes a raft on wheels,
Tory stays high and dry on a fake blue sea.
Because although this myth is all about boats,
there's no need to get wet yet.
Now, obviously we could test it on water,
but water poses a couple of problems.
One, it takes a lot of force
to get the boat to move through the water... .44 pounds, to be exact.
Plus, getting the boat to move straight in the water
is gonna be another problem we have to overcome,
but I have a solution for both of those.
Instead of using the boat and water,
we're gonna use this cart with wheels on this flat piece of acrylic.
That way, the cart will go straight,
and we're gonna reduce the amount of friction.
It only takes .24 pounds of force to move this car.
This is gonna be perfect.
Still to come on "MythBusters"... - Wap-sha!
...the audio action heats up,
...there's a sting in the tail,
This is Big Bob.
...and Tory rides back to the future.
This is a very bad idea.
Over the years, the MythBusters
have tackled a heap of Hollywood tall tales.
Until now, the myths have been based upon the tendency of movie-makers
to suspend reality with physics-defying visual effects.
But this time, Adam and Jamie are hot on the aural trail.
And to find out if a big-screen punch
sounds anything like the real thing, Adam's upping the ante.
As I really don't want to hurt this anymore
by punching this poor pig,
I'm gonna make a fist-punching analog... not a machine.
It's gonna be pretty simple.
It's gonna be a combination of this and a combination of that.
Here we go.
The ballistics-gel fist will provide an accurate-sounding
skin-on-skin contact, and the leverage of the bat
will ensure Adam gets a good, solid hit.
Wap-sha!
I think it's ready.
That was nice.
Let's listen.
To the naked ear, it was a marked improvement,
but let's get an objective comparison.
That was pretty good.
All right, let's listen to the movie sound.
There's no comparison.
If the myth was on the ropes before, it's down for the count now.
But if the movie effect isn't a recording of a real punch,
what exactly is it?
We need to talk to an expert.
I think we do.
Where are we gonna find one?
With a résumé that includes a heap
of Tim Burton blockbusters,
Steve knows exactly how to pack a Hollywood punch.
Why doesn't our best punch sound like this?
You have a punch that sounds like punching a face.
The Hollywood one is not about that.
It's about drama. It's about selling the story.
You might add a whoosh of something like this...
a pipe or a dowel.
- All right. - Just a little bit of that leading into
the punch is gonna give you that sense of the fist really moving fast.
I noticed that you had the really good slap sound,
but you might want to have a little bit of chest,
kind of, like, low end to it.
You can either just...
Just a little bit of that can give you that sense of kind of a skull
- underneath that face slap that you got. - Yeah.
What else?
You might want to hear the sound of a skull cracking.
Wow!
Walnuts. I love it.
So those are the individual elements
that go to make up a Hollywood punch, and by layering them,
you get a result that's rich in texture and depth.
Let's take our best punch at the pig.
All right, now, Steve said it needed some low end.
Let's take one of Steve's chest hits.
Now, he said it needed a whoosh.
Let's take one of the swings he made of that little pipe.
And then, finally, let's add in some bone-cracking walnut sounds...
and play them all together and see what we get.
It's pretty good, huh?
Yep, but it doesn't change the result.
Punch sound effects are Hollywood fiction, and the myth is busted.
Kari, Grant, and Tory are tackling a maritime myth
that contradicts the father of physics.
Can you move your boat by blowing your own sail?
To find out, they're setting up a small-scale proof-of-concept.
Okay, the next step is the fans.
So I got a whole bunch of the little desk fans,
and I'm gonna see if any of them are gonna work for this experiment.
When I turn them on and put them on here,
it should push the little car backwards.
- Kari needs to find a fan... - Okay, you're not gonna work.
- ...with a power-to-weight ratio... - Nope.
...that will make the raft move.
I think it's too heavy.
The desk fans are just too feeble,
so Kari goes for broke with a model airplane propeller.
Okay, ready?
That ought to work.
Meanwhile, Grant has a small-scale sail up his sleeve,
and after he rigs it to the raft,
the guys are all set to clear up the fan-site controversy.
Wow! Wow! Wow!
When you blow your own sail,
will you stall, as the newtonian advocates predict,
or sail off into the sunset?
All right, now it's time to replicate the myth in small scale.
We have our fan attached to our raft,
which is going to be blowing into the sail
that's attached to the raft.
Now, according to Newton's third law of motion,
these two forces should cancel each other out,
and this boat is gonna stall.
So, just like in the myth, the wind source is on the boat.
Okay. Blow your own sail.
Here we go.
- All right. - That's great.
All right, looks like Newton's laws are canceling out cartoon laws.
Yep, and here's how.
If you do a test without the sail, using just the fan,
you can see there's enough thrust to move the boat backwards.
But put a sail in the way, and that backwards thrust
is canceled out by the equal and opposite force
pushing the boat forward.
The boat stalls, and the myth is busted.
Or is it?
Because our intrepid trio aren't giving up so easily.
Coming up next on "MythBusters,"
can we use this fan to blow our own sail?
What do we have next?
Well, as you know, the rattlesnake...
the venomous rattlesnake and its iconic warning rattle
are completely endemic to American Western.
And what I want to know is, is the sound we're accustomed
to hearing from the rattlesnake actually a real rattlesnake sound?
Well, this isn't a rattler.
This is a Madagascar tree boa.
You are such a buzz kill.
She likes you.
Yeah.
I like her.
Anybody that's seen a Western
knows the sound that a rattlesnake makes,
but is that actually the sound, or is that a movie construct?
So we're gonna have to get ourselves a real rattlesnake
and see what they sound like.
So, Owen, are we gonna be able to get him to rattle
without freaking him out?
Well, this is Big Bob, and just try stopping him.
Really?
- Yeah. - He likes to rattle?
He likes to talk.
This is Big Bob, and this is the classic movie sound effect
of the rattlesnake.
What we want to know is how much like that does Big Bob sound?
Shall we record this guy?
I think so.
Here we go.
Let's go for it.
Awesome!
There we go.
That sounded pretty good,
but let's get an objective assessment.
All right.
Let's start with the movie rattlesnake.
Here we go.
And now here's Big Bob.
That is dead on!
That's the same sound.
Absolutely clear that they used real rattlesnakes
to make rattlesnake sounds in films.
I think so.
Confirmed!
So far in "blow your own sail",
there are no flaws in Newton's laws.
The forward thrust captured by the sail
has an equal and opposite force pushing backwards,
leaving the boat grounded.
But it's not over yet.
The team thinks that tweaking the variables might get things moving.
So, we're gonna do all sorts of experiments.
We're gonna try different sails, we're gonna try different winds,
and we're gonna see if we can actually blow your own sail.
Yep, with the fan, sail, and boat
all in proportion, everything is canceled out.
So they're starting by making their small-scale sail smaller.
Now, you're probably asking yourself,
"why are you guys testing a small sail"?
But if you look to the graphic,
you'll see what I think is gonna happen.
I think that the wind is gonna actually get around the small sail
and push the sailboat backwards.
Now, given what we've seen so far, it may seem surprising to you
that we think the boat is gonna travel backwards.
Now, there's a lot of thrust coming off of this prop.
If the size of the sail is small compared to source of the wind,
you may get some of that thrust
escaping around the edges of the sail,
giving us a net thrust, pushing the boat backwards.
All right, here we go.
3, 2, 1.
Hey, look at that. It cancels itself out.
All right, you know what? Should we turn up the speed?
- Sure. - Yeah, let's try it and see what happens.
Whoa!
- That was weird. - It's going backwards.
It seems if the sail contains all of the fan's thrust,
the boat is marooned, but tweak the sail size and fan speed,
and you start moving.
However, they're heading in the wrong direction.
To reverse that, maybe they need to go bigger.
For the next test, we've stepped up the size of the sail.
But to do that, we also had to raise the fan
so that the air stream hits right into the center of our sail.
Hopefully this will propel the boat.
- Ready when you are. - Okay. Here we go.
- Wow. - Yeah.
It's not going forward at all.
The forces are still canceling each other out.
Can you dial it up?
Going to 100%.
Whoa! That's looking scary!
It's starting to go! It's starting to go!
Faster! It's moving forward!
Whoo!
Hey!
With faster wind speed, you can blow your own sail.
All right, look... I'm not a sailor,
and I'm not an aeronautical engineer,
but this is what I think is happening.
So, the fan provides a certain amount of thrust
that blows into the sail.
The sail, in turn, can only absorb so much of that thrust.
The rest of it gets reflected back,
leaving us with a net-thrust vector, causing the boat to go forward.
Yep, the reflection means the sum of the total thrust
is in a forward direction.
So, you just need a lot more wind.
A lot more.
What is the most wind we can produce
with the biggest fan we can use?
- Jet engine. - Yeah!
- That would be awesome. - Now you're talking.
What a great proof-of-concept, though.
Next on "MythBusters"... - Come on!
...will "blow your own sail" take off?
Kari, Grant, and Tory
have found that with enough puff and big enough sail,
it is possible to blow your own sail.
Oh, more power!
But their little toy raft didn't move very fast.
To nail this sea-going saga in the small scale,
the team feel the need for more speed.
So we are moving on to a jet-cap model turbine engine.
This thing can make a model plane fly at 250 miles an hour.
It puts out 17.5 pounds of thrust.
This is gonna give us the wind speeds that we need.
But first, what I need to do
is mount this engine to our longboard skateboard.
And the reason why we're using a longboard skateboard
is because this thing puts out so much heat,
we got to keep our sail away from the source.
And speaking of heat...
So, one of the problems with upgrading our source of thrust
to a jet engine is that the exhaust gases
can be in excess of 600 degrees Celsius.
Now, this is silk.
This is the ideal material we found for our small-scale experiment.
The only problem with silk is that when you expose it to flame...
this happens.
So while Grant looks into flame-resistant sail materials,
Tory gets busy with the sailboard build.
Just like before, they'll be on land
using wheels rather than on water in a boat.
It's kind of fitting that we're using this jet engine,
'cause a long time ago, I actually built a jet engine
out of a vacuum cleaner motor.
It didn't have much thrust.
I mean, it practically had no thrust at all,
but it's kind of cool to actually use a real jet engine
for an experiment.
With the baby engine on board, it's over to Grant.
Okay, so, this is flame-resistant material.
This is a 6061 aluminum frame,
which has a melting temperature above that of the jet exhaust.
This is the kind of sail you're gonna need
if you're gonna use a jet engine to blow yourself along.
The jet-powered sailboard is done.
Now to give it a run.
There are not many places you can fire off a mini jet engine,
but a creepy, abandoned naval base is one.
This thing looks dangerous.
Yeah, I think we need to ride it before we test.
- What do you think? - Ride a jet-powered skateboard?
Yeah! Aren't you guys dying to do it?
Not really, but I would enjoy another decade
of watching you fall off this thing in slow motion.
It worked for the bicycle.
Oh!
I think this is a very bad idea.
So, before we start doing the experiment,
I want to test this engine.
So I've turned the engine around.
That way I can ride it, and I won't burn my butt.
And fortunately for Tory,
our health insurance actually covers a full body cast.
Kind of getting nervous. I don't know why.
So if anything untoward should happen, he'll be covered.
What could possibly go wrong?
I got a jet engine strapped to this skateboard.
All right, firing it up.
Medics standing by.
Somebody dial 91.
On his jet-powered skateboard,
is Tory about to take a trip to the future
or a trip back to the E.R.?
Oh, my God, it worked!
Every kid's gonna want one of these for Christmas.
Now, that was a good test.
I mean, what that tells me is that the jet engine,
which, mind you, is only this big,
provides enough thrust to carry Tory,
who weighs 175 pounds, on top of the skateboard.
Now, if we replace Tory with the sail,
I think we're gonna have plenty of thrust for our experiment.
All right, this is extreme "blow your own sail".
Do it.
Oh, I love this sound.
Come on, baby!
Come on!
- Got to love that sound. - Come on!
- It's going! It's going! - It's moving!
That worked perfectly.
The jet engine was powerful enough to overcome the canceling forces,
and we got our sailboat to move forward.
Whoo!
All right, we did it!
We blew our own sail!
Nice!
So, initially, when we started out testing this myth,
it was with a very small boat on top of a table.
And this... this is what we do.
We step things up each time,
and we've gone to a jet-powered skateboard with a fireproof sail.
And I've got to say, this is great
because what this says is that, each time,
it's been possible to blow your own sail.
Now we just got to go up to the big thing... the real thing...
the boat.
Next step's gonna be fun.
Full-scale, baby.
And back at the shop,
they've taken delivery of just the thing...
a boat with a built-in fan.
So, we are gonna take this myth full-scale,
and this is the boat we are gonna use.
It is a shallow-water spider swamp boat.
And this thing comes with a fan,
which is attached to a 40-horsepower engine
that's capable of putting out 200 pounds of thrust.
We're gonna take this fan, flip it around,
put up a mast, put up the sail, and see if we can blow our own sail.
It was dragging me.
It was actually pulling me off my feet.
I think this is gonna do it.
With Grant measuring wind speeds of 63 miles per hour,
this puppy is clearly powerful enough...
which means it's time to take delivery of the sail
and get busy with the rigging.
Okay, now that we have the sail, it's time to erect the mast.
Now, we're making it out of aluminum
because it's lightweight and has a really high tensile strength.
But we're making a removable base completely out of steel.
We want to clamp onto the boat instead of drilling or welding
because it's a borrowed boat and it's gorgeous.
Against all odds, our team of landlubbers
has built and rigged its own square sail from scratch.
Faster.
Go faster.
Whoo!
Ready to blow your sail?
Yeah, I don't have enough wind.
To find out if it'll go when the fan blows,
it's time to take this test down to the waterline.
We found ourselves a lake that's completely isolated
so we have no current and no wind.
This should be the perfect place to experiment.
And the perfect place for a pre-test joyride.
With the throttle full on, the team thrashes around,
getting their bearings
and getting a feel for the swamp boat's fan-powered thrust.
It handles beautifully.
Love it.
But will it sail?
The next classic Hollywood sound effect
to get the MythBusters treatment is the gun silencer.
And down at the South San Francisco Police Department
shooting range, the boys mean business.
Cue Meyer Sound's senior audio scientist, Dr. Roger Schwenke.
With several previous appearances on the show,
he gets the much-sought-after title of "honorary mythbuster".
Stir the pot, baby.
And today, he's brought along
his laboratory-grade recording and analysis equipment.
We want to see whether these things
actually make the same sounds in real life
that they do in the movies, or do they make any sound at all?
How do these silencers work?
Well, they're kind of like mufflers on cars.
They've got a series of baffles in them that sort of slow down
and redirect the gases that are passing through
and absorb a lot of the energy and the sound.
That's how silencers silence,
but outside a movie theater, what exactly are they used for?
Look, we would be remiss if we didn't explain
that this is not an assassin's tool.
Actually, military and law enforcement
love suppressors for four main reasons.
The extra weight out at the front of the gun
actually reduces both muzzle lift and the recoil of the gun,
making it easier to aim and stay on target.
It does, actually, reduce the sound and the concussion...
the blast of the bullet.
And it also reduces the muzzle flash to zero.
All of which makes this a safer and easier weapon to use.
Right. Let's get down to testing.
First up, Adam and Jamie take aim at a baseline.
First, we are going to fire an unmodified pistol at the target.
And 3, 2, 1.
Then we're going to put a silencer on that gun
and shoot again at the target
and compare the silenced round sound to the original gun sound
and to the movie sound effect of a silencer.
I'm holding a silenced pistol!
It's just as cool as you think it is.
Now for the suppressor.
Is the movie version anything like reality?
Thank you.
Do silencers work as well in real life as they do on film?
That's nice.
That was pretty cool.
That seemed a lot quieter than I thought it would.
And Jamie's 9-millimeter pistol is equally surprising.
It's an impressive improvement,
but for analysis, let's hear from our expert acoustician.
First, decibels... a measure of the intensity of the sound pressure.
So, we go from 161, and then suppressed, we go down to 128.
That's a big change.
That goes from dangerous to your hearing to safe.
But it's not just the power.
The texture and time signature of the sound is also altered.
Can we hear them?
Here's the unsuppressed.
Okay, now let's hear suppressed.
Yeah, that tells the story.
And it's a story worth hearing again.
A story with a surprise ending.
I swear, I went into this one
thinking this would be completely busted, and I'm kind of blown away.
But what about the all-important movie version?
How does that stack up?
Can we hear the Hollywood sound?
Yeah, sure.
Dude, that is far out.
Far out, indeed.
But although it's not quite identical...
the real-life suppressor does reduce the volume
of the gunshot to Hollywood levels.
And that's enough to impress Adam... a lot.
One of the most common questions we get is,
are we surprised by the results that we come up with on the show?
Today... monstrously surprised.
I arrived at work this morning
expecting that we would completely bust the myth
that you could possibly suppress the sound of a bullet
anywhere close to what the movies would lead you to believe,
and I leave today being a convert to the idea
this thing is totally plausible.
The only reason I'm not calling it confirmed
is because instead of a "kew! kew!" sound
like they do in the movies...
I'm shooting my cameraman's knees out here...
...it's more like a "pff! pff!" sound.
But that is picking nits as far as I'm concerned.
This is astonishing.
Okay, so, here's the plan...
We've got our full-size fan boat and our full-size sail.
We get out on the water and try it first
in its regular configuration of fan facing backwards,
and we'll turn it on and, hopefully, go forward.
Then, we're going to flip the fan around, raise the sail...
All right, we're in.
...and see if you can actually blow your own sail.
There she blows!
So, first up, with the fan pointing backwards,
Kari and Grant will do a straight-line speed test.
That way, when they get the sail up and face the fan forwards,
they'll have a reference for their performance.
How do you feel about calling this the "Queen Airy"?
She may have a name,
but the "Queen Airy" is not off to the best of starts.
I think we're in a bit of a predicament here.
The weight of the sail
is making it very tricky to maneuver.
All right, you guys are going zero miles an hour.
But despite Tory's encouragement...
Looks like these islands are boat magnets.
...Grant and Kari do finally get into position.
The first test up is the fan in the right configuration,
the sail down.
I'm gonna get in the chase boat, have them drive towards me,
and I'm gonna check their speed with the radar gun.
All right, this is the first test...
fan facing backwards, sail down speed test.
Here we go.
Now, if you asked me when we were in the shop
and we first turned on the swamp boat
and Grant took out the anemometer
and got 60 miles an hour standing behind the fan,
I would have said that "blow your own sailboat"
was going to... boom!... blast across the water.
But now that we've done a test with the mast on,
even with the sail down, it really slowed down the boat.
I think we're gonna get some movement, but it's gonna be slight.
How fast were we?
20 miles an hour.
That was a good test.
Let's flip the fan around and put the sail up
and see how fast we go when we blow our own sail.
- Aaah! - Aah!
Whoop.
Kari, Grant, and Tory are preparing to flip the fan
and raise the sail for a physics-defying finale.
They're about to find out, with a real boat on real water,
if it's possible to really blow your own sail.
But plain sailing it's not.
I feel like there might be just a little element of danger here.
I hope that holds.
I mean, the swamp boat is not meant to have the fan backwards,
and it's definitely not meant
to have this giant, lumbering sail on it.
How's your line of sight?
I think we might actually have a little danger of tipping.
I just really don't want to get wet today.
Raise the mainsail!
Trim the jibjab!
I'm trimming as fast as I can!
Now, in order for this myth to be confirmed,
what we're looking for is forward movement
due to the fan blowing into the sail.
Not drifting, not just poking along...
we're actually talking about directed forward movement.
We get that, and we're looking at "confirmed."
Okay, I think that looks parallel.
So, what we're also interested in
is the comparison of the speed of the fan blowing into the sail
versus the fan pointed backwards.
All right, you guys ready?
Will we get improvement?
Probably not.
The target that we're looking at is 20 miles an hour.
If we get even a quarter of that... 5 miles an hour...
I will be very, very impressed.
Or... and it's a very real possibility...
the shallow-bottom boat with its top-heavy sail goes bottom up.
Okay, we're in.
We have no idea what can go wrong.
I mean, the mast could blow off. The boat could flip over.
They might get sucked into the fan
and chopped up into little pieces.
Hey, good sailing.
Good luck.
What was that about being sucked into the fan?
Chopped into little pieces?
They're off.
Tory in the support vehicle tows them out to open water.
With plenty of space, no major winds or currents,
it's the perfect location for a spot of scientific sailing.
- All right, you ready to do this? - Ready.
Okay. Here we go.
This is "blow your own sail" with the full-size boat.
Full throttle!
I got to tell you, the funniest part
about this whole experiment is when we first turned on that fan
and the boat just started to spin and dip down in one direction.
Grant and I both were super wide-eyed
because we thought we were going over.
They're wildly out of control.
There's no forward movement,
just a whole lot of spinning and crashing.
So, when we first started and I gunned it,
we started turning in a circle.
I was like, "This is it. That's it."
"We're going in the water."
But I turned it down, and we tried it again,
- and, actually, what I found was... - Yeah!
It's moving forward!
...if you keep vectoring the fan,
if you keep that thrust at the sail,
you can actually get it to go forward.
There she blows!
Look at it! They're going forward!
We blew our own sail!
It's working!
By ramping it up MythBusters-style, the team
has seemingly contradicted newtonian physics.
It's working!
They're blowing their own sail.
Now, this was nuts.
We only got 3 miles an hour, but we actually got movement.
We got forward movement, and we were able to steer
by pointing the wind into different parts of the sail.
I have to say, this is a successful day.
3 miles an hour!
No doubt they'd go a lot faster
with the fan facing backwards and no sail, but that's not the point.
The myth asks, can you power a sailboat with your own fan?
And you can.
Now, I don't know exactly what's going on,
because apparently we're flying in the face of Newton's laws,
but here's what I think is happening.
We have a significant amount of thrust coming out of this fan.
It's hitting the sail, and the sail can only push so much.
The rest of that thrust gets reflected back,
giving us a net thrust, pushing us in a forward direction.
And forward in both directions,
because to prove that real wind wasn't a factor,
Grant and Kari sailed both ways.
Dude, that was awesome!
I cannot believe it! We blew our own sail!
This one is totally confirmed.
Totally confirmed.
I mean, this thing went forward with the wind from our own fan.
Confirmed!
You may remember in the opening sequence,
Adam and Jamie set off a Hollywood-style explosive fireball.
Bye-bye.
But despite having plenty,
the guys didn't blow up the car just for fun.
It was part of the test to find out
whether the ubiquitous explosive sound effect
you hear in the movies is anything like the real thing.
So first up, let's show you the ingredients
of a typical silver-screen big bang.
Two gallons of gasoline ringed in some det cord
and stuck in the front seat...
that's how Hollywood makes its spectacular fireball explosions.
But what do they really sound like?
Bye-bye.
It's quite a difference, huh?
Much like the punch,
the movie version has a lot more texture and depth.
Quite simply, it's more dramatic than the real thing.
How did the wave forms compare?
They're clearly very different.
The gas explosion we just did had a very sudden onset,
and the energy is concentrated
in a very narrow range of low frequencies.
Whereas the classic movie explosion...
has a much slower onset,
and the energy is over a much wider range of frequencies,
and it lasts for a much, much longer time.
It's a very different sound.
Which sounds like a busted myth,
but the guys aren't done yet.
They're not getting bogged down with just one big boom.
If the sound of a gasoline-fueled fireball
doesn't match the movies, maybe a real high explosive will.
Cue our old friend C-4.
Now we're gonna blow this car up for realsies
and check out how that sounds.
All right, here we go.
2.2 pounds of C-4 in 3, 2, 1!
Ka-boom!
That was a good, solid thud.
Kind of makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, don't it?
It does.
A good, solid thud,
but once again, it's clearly a completely different sound
to the sound effect.
I'm looking at the top at the movie explosion,
and I'm seeing this big, wide bandwidth of sound.
And I see the C-4, and I see nothing like that.
I see one sharp impulse, a little bit of surrounding noise,
but nowhere near the depth and the range of the movie explosion.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I think that one's busted.
Yep, the contrast
between the real explosions and the film sound effect
is as clear as a bell.
And that leaves this final movie myth about as busted as the car.
Let's get out of here before our shoes get all dirty.
Sync and corrected by atrn97g www.addic7ed.com
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