I honestly don’t know how I skipped over this episode with my MacGyver science notes. Oh well, let’s finish this up. There aren’t too many hacks in this episode, so this won’t be too long.

One Way Mirror

Murdoc makes a great point. Is it a one way mirror or a two way mirror? The main idea is that Murdoc can’t see through the glass, but the other people can see through to view what Murdoc is doing.

These things aren’t magic. At the most basic level, a “one way mirror” is just a plane of glass. When light hits glass, some of it is reflected and some of it is transmitted. If you are on one side of the glass and there is WAY more reflected light coming back at you than the light transmitted from the other side, then you can’t see that transmitted light. The glass would look like a mirror.

This is exactly what happens when you are inside a house at night with the lights on. The lights reflect too much and there isn’t much light from outside coming in, so you just see a reflection. It would look like this.

If you are outside on a dark night, the opposite is true. You can see INTO the house.

So, for the one way mirror, you need a glass separating two rooms. The dark room is the room with the observers and the light room is where the prisoner sits.

Here is an older post with more details about seeing through windows.

Pulley Skateboard Battering Ram

This is a classic simple machine. The key to all simple machines is that you can make a system that pulls over a greater distance and produces a greater force (or you can do it the opposite of this).

In this case, MacGyver makes a compound pulley. You need two pulleys. If you run the string through these two pulleys, you can make two different distances. The distance one side is pulled is twice the distance of the other side. Here is a diagram.

Yes, that’s a rather crude sketch—I did it fairly quickly. Here is a video that walks through the setup. I mention that there are two ways to set up this skateboard battering ram, this only covers one method.

Here is a much more detailed post on pulleys.

Stopping a Truck with a Truck

MacGyver uses a winch cable to connect their truck to Murdoc’s truck. They then slam on the breaks. So, would this work? Yeah, probably.

Assuming the two vehicles have the same material for the tires, then they would have the same coefficient of friction. A basic model for friction says that the frictional force is proportional to the force the ground pushes up on the object (we call this the normal force).

Since both cars are on flat ground, the normal force is equal to the car’s weight. That means the heavier car would have a greater frictional force. Yes, I’m making some other assumptions about the tires “locking up”—but still, this is plausible.

Even if the frictional force wasn’t enough to stop the truck, the cable is attached to the side of Murdoc’s truck. This side force would rotate the truck and also prevent it from driving straight.