Recently, a new show has appeared on “The Discovery Channel” called “Smash Lab”. The premise of the show is simple: four smart people – an engineer, an “ideas guy”, a scientist, and a designer – get together and try to approach real-world problems with innovative technology. For instance, using carbon-fiber wrap to hurricane-proof a mobile home, or using softened concrete to slow down a run-away highway vehicle. I’m impressed by all of the problems so far posed; the hurricane-proofing of mobile homes was particularly interesting, given how many of these homes are in the path of hurricanes along the coastal United States.<\/p>\n
However, several things about the show have bothered me, as a scientist. The pilot episode exemplifies my concerns, though I will say that I’ve become more impressed with the discipline of the team as the show has progressed. In the first episode, the team tries to slow down run-away cars and buses using an easy-crumble concrete. This concrete is already used on some airport runways to slow down and stop run-away planes. The concrete crumbles more easily, absorbing the energy of a collision gradually to reduce the instantaneous forces on passengers inside the vehicle.<\/p>\n
The team tried several ideas, including changing normal concrete road barriers into softened barriers, or putting a surface of the crumbly concrete in the median so that a vehicle crossing the median slows and stops before hitting on-coming traffic on the other side of the highway. Despite their effort, the ideas were all miserable failures. That’s fine – science is about failure, and learning from failure, to achieve success. However, the team seemed to declare victory at the end. Why? Well, they all failed to stop a car. However, they were able to slow-down a bus crossing the median on the crumbly surface.<\/p>\n
What bothers me about this is that the team redefined success at the end of the experiment, allowing them to declare a victory. Cars are far more common on U.S. highways than buses, and so therefore the probability of a fatal accident from a run-away car is far higher than from a bus. The failure of the experiment to stop a car without killing the passengers, or without actually stopping the car, amounts to a failure in the bulk of the cases in which this technology could be tested. Succeeding in stopping a bus is good, and dramatic, but hardly more important than stopping a car. <\/p>\n
The team should have admitted defeat. In fact, they’ve done so in a later episode when they failed to fully protect a mobile home from a hurricane, or even when they failed to save a car on railroad tracks from a deadly train strike. That’s good science. But in the pilot, the lead episode of the show, they redefined success at the end so they had something good to claim.<\/p>\n
Failing to meet the goals of an experiment can be just as useful as finding success. Perhaps collapsable concrete is a bad technology, one which cannot or should not be adapted to solve the problem of a run-away car. Declaring some measure of victory, using a smaller part of the overall problem as the basis of the claim, can prolong the life of a failed technology. It would be better to spend innovation on a better idea than try to pump up a bad one. That’s an important aspect of science. <\/p>\n
I’m growing to like Smash Lab. The earthquake-proofing of a house with ball-bearings was swank, something I think should be adapted to normal house construction. But the concrete barrier should have been something abandoned by the team as a bad idea. It’s a shame they couldn’t proudly accept defeat, instead of redefining success just to achieve it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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