Its not Astronomy but what a great article!! Make sure you click on the link at the end to read the full story!!
When the first episode of Mythbusters aired in 2003, I couldn’t drive a car. I couldn’t see a R-rated movie. I was 14-years old and I couldn’t do much of anything. But Mythbusters taught me that I could do science.
Raised on Bill Nye videos, LEGOs, and CD-ROMs of dinosaurs, I was a lump of nerdy clay waiting to be molded. Mythbusters came to me at a critical time, and it transformed me into who I am today. Maybe it’s naïve to think that one television show shaped my entire professional trajectory, but if any TV show did, it was Mythbusters. I jumped into high school chemistry and biology without a second thought, in protest of my dismissive classmates. In my physics class I would interject with tidbits I learned from the show. When learning about circuits I asked, “Is this sort of like a Leyden jar?” My professor responded with, “Yes it is…where did you learn that?” My answer was consistent.
When I got to college, my burgeoning passion for science steered me into engineering. I still watched Mythbusters every week. Once, in my thermodynamics class, my professor explained why what Adam, Jamie, and the gang did wasn’t really science. I defended them.
With enough episodes in the bag to fill 10 straight days with explosions, Mythbusters enters its tenth season this summer, accepting a torch passed on to them by the likes of Sagan and Nye. In popular science communication, they stand alone amidst a cable TV landscape filled with mermaids, “ancient aliens,” and Bigfoot. The show really is a phenomenon like COSMOS or The Big Bang Theory. I’d argue that it has done more for the public understanding of science than almost any medium before it.
via A Decade of Explosions: What Mythbusters Taught Me | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network.
