# MacGyver Season 3 Episode 19 Science Notes: Friends + Enemies + Border

Crane and winch

The problem with a sinkhole is that the sides of the hole are unstable. You can’t just climb up the side or lower a rope down the side. This would just cause further collapse.

The answer is to get a crane. Something that sticks out over the edge of the hole, but doesn’t interact with the hole. Really, this is mostly just a nice build—but there is one physics thing to discuss.

You can’t just get a pole and stick it out from the truck and expect that pole to lift any weight of significance. It will bend or break. You need some type of structure to allow the crane to exert a torque on the end.

Here are two ways you could do that. First, you could make a type of truss. It might look something like this:

The triangle structure in the truss makes the whole thing rigid. Also, it allows multiple forces on the support end. There needs to be a force that will exert a torque to counteract the torque from the load.

The second method is to use a cable. I’m sure there is a technical term for this, but I’m just going to call it a cable. It would look like this.

I just realized that there was a mistake on the forces for the truss diagram. But you still get the idea.

Bonus, here is my initial diagram for this situation.

What about the tire and rope thing? Yes, this should work. MacGyver takes the rope and wraps it around the tire. This means that the truck’s engine can be the power to lift the humans out of the hole.

DIY Furnace

MacGyver needs to fashion a vascular clamp from some normal clamps. To do this, he builds a mini furnace. This is real. Actually, I built one of these with my daughter so that we could melt aluminum. Here is the video we started with. Note: this is awesome, but also dangerous.

This actually works. There is something amazing about melting metal with charcoal. We started off with a charcoal furnace and an old vacuum cleaner to blow in air. It works, but it goes through a bunch of charcoal really quickly. So, we switched to a propane version—this is much easier.

Bonus—here is my furnace diagram for the show.

Flash Bang

I don’t want to write about the flash bangs—but I should say there is a legitimate basis for this. I just don’t want to tell you.

# MacGyver Season 2 Episode 4 Science Notes: X-Ray + Penny

Hydraulic Hammer

OK, it’s not really a hammer. It’s more like a pressure gun. MacGyver hooks up a pressured line from a water heater to a tube with a rod in it. When the pressure is released, it shoots the rod and hits the door handle to knock it out. That’s great.

If you want it to “hammer” back and forth, you need to do something different. Here is a very basic design.

There is still a tube with a rod, but there are two differences. First, there is a hole on the side of the tube. As the rod moves forward (due to the pressure from the hose), it eventually gets to the part where the side hole is exposed. This would allow the pressure to escape and the rod would stop moving forward.

The other feature is a spring. One side of the spring is mounted to the outside tube and the other to the inside rod (yes, there needs to be a small slit in the tube). This spring will pull the rod back into place once the pressure escapes.

I really don’t know if this would work.

Finding Location with Sound.

This one was tough—but fun. How can MacGyver use evidence he collects to go back and figure out his location? In this case, he uses sound.

In air, sound travels at a finite speed. Technically, the speed of sound depends on the temperature of the air—but using a value of 340 meters per second is a reasonable value.

Since this sound speed is finite, it takes some finite amount of time for this sound to travel over a distance. But of course you already know this because you have seen lightning and heard the thunder. The light part of this lightning strike travels at the speed of light (which is really, really fast). However, the sound part of the strike travels much slower. This means that you see the lightning and then hear the thunder later. The farther away you are from the lightning strike, the bigger the time difference between these two signals.

For MacGyver’s case, he is going to use two sounds that start from different distances and at different times, but reach him (he hears them) at the same time. In this case the sounds are from church bells and a fire station. It’s sort of like the opposite of the lightning problem except that it’s totally different.

So, here is what he knows.

• Church bells every half hour.
• Fire station alarm went off at 1:29 and 58 seconds.

That means the sound from the church bells traveled for 2 more seconds than the fire station sound. How far away is MacGyver from the 2 sources? Yes, this is a more difficult problem—but it’s not impossible.

This is what MacGyver writes on the board to solve this.

Now for fun, here is my original solution.

Isn’t that fun? Well, it is for me. Oh, what about the two points? You can think of this problem as two expanding circles. Each circle represents a sound and the circle’s radius increases at a rate equal to the speed of sound. So, one circle is going to be bigger than the other one (because that sound was created first). We are looking for the places where the two circles intersect. Yes, there are two of these locations. MacGyver picks the location based on the direction of water flow in the sewer.

You know, I really should make a python animation for this problem. Maybe I will do that soon. Oh, one final note. For my solution above, I recreated the calculation so that it would have the correct values. At the time, I was at my son’s soccer practice. So this is a picture of my notes as they are sitting on the seat of the car. True.

X-Ray Fluorescence

It’s real. The basic idea is to use x-rays on the film. These x-rays excite some of the atoms in the film such that they fluoresce and produce infrared light. You can’t see the IR light, but a video camera can.

It’s something like this—a technique that is used to look at different layers in paintings.

https://www.livescience.com/13499-hidden-painting-features-xrays-110331.html

As a bonus, I made a short video explaining x-ray fluorescence.

# MacGyver Season 3 Episode 18 Science Notes: Murdoc + Helman + Hit

There’s really only two MacGyver hacks in this episode—but wait! Don’t be upset, it’s a good thing. First, it happens to be a great episode. Second, when you don’t have a set number of hacks in an episode it just feels like the story uses these hacks rather than revolve around them.

Overall, it was a great episode.

One way mirror.

This wasn’t a MacGyver hack, but it as funny and there is some nice science here. So, what is a one way mirror? Also, Murdoc has a point. Shouldn’t it be a two way mirror? Actually, there are several names for these things:

• One way mirror.
• Two way mirror.
• One way glass.
• Half silvered mirror.
• Semi-transparent mirror.

I guess you can call it whatever you want. But how does it work? There are a few important things to go over. First—how do we see things? Suppose there is a pencil on a table. If you see that pencil, it’s because light reflects off that pencil and then enters your eyes. Here is a diagram (from my post on 5 Things Every Human Should Know About Light).

Second—how does a window work? In the most basic form, a window could just be a piece of glass. When light hits glass, two things happen. Some of the light is transmitted and some of the light is reflected. Yes, this pretty much always happens. OK, I lied. There are some cases where all the light is transmitted and other cases where all is reflected.

I can prove this to you. If you are inside a house on a sunny day, you can see outside but other people can’t see in. The problem is that the outside stuff is so bright that the reflected light is way more than the light coming through (from the inside) and you can’t see it. Here is a diagram (from this old post of mine).

Now back to the “one way mirror”. The key is to have the room with the observers darker than the room with the people you want to watch.

Skateboard with a pulley.

There is a door, but it’s trapped. It’s a trapped-door. Get it? OK, so MacGyver needs to bust this down but without people nearby in case it explodes (it does explode). He takes the battering ram weight and puts it on a skateboard. Then he run some string over a couple of pulleys so that he can get this thing up to speed and smash into the door.

Here is a diagram (from my show notes) to see how you would set this up.

The key to a pulley system is to set it up so that the distance the object moves is different than the distance the person pulls. In fact, this is the key idea to all simple machines (a compound pulley is indeed a simple machine).

In the diagram above, if Mac pulls the bottom pulley (this is a top view) one meter, then there would need to be two meters of string move that way (since the string is doubled over). That means the skate-board and battering ram would move 2 meters for this 1 meter of pull.

Yes, the skate board would move twice as fast as MacGyver. But you don’t get something for nothing. Although he only moves 1 meter for the 2 of the board, there would be twice the force on MacGyver. This is how simple machines work.

Slowing down a car with a winch.

MacGyver grabs the winch on the truck and then jumps to the truck with Murdoc. He wraps the cable around a post and then Oversight slams on the brakes. Both cars stop.

Yes, the friction from the rear truck would indeed slow down the other car (if not stop it). However, since the cable is attached to the side of Murdoc’s truck, the force from the cable will also turn that truck. Once it get’s turn too much, it can’t even drive straight. Now both trucks are essentially sliding with rubber wheel interacting with the road. That’s why it stops.

# MacGyver Season 2 Episode 3 Science Notes: Roulette Wheel + Wire

Is there a better MacGyver image than his radio build at the beginning of the episode? I think not. Here is an image.

Could you actually build a radio from a snow mobile? I think yes. Really, radios aren’t actually that complicated. The only difficult part would be building an amplifier so that the signal generated from a voice is powerful enough to be detected by someone’s radio. If the snow mobile had any kind of radio (like for listening), you would have all the parts you would need.

Stun gun on slot machine

They call these hand held zap things stun guns, but they don’t shoot. You just have to hold them up to someone to shock them.

MacGyver needs a distraction so he takes the stun gun and uses it on a slot machine. After that, the guy playing wins.

Is this even possible? Possible, yes. Likely, no. The stun gun has high voltage that creates sparks. These sparks can damage electronic equipment—especially the super tiny transistors in a computer chip. So, it’s possible that the stun gun does something to cause a win.

However, these slot machines are built with tampering in mind. They need to be able to resist humans messing around with them to win. So, I doubt this would work. Also, if MacGyver zaps that outside of the machine it’s probably grounded. This means that the electric current that gets into the case of the slot machine will just go around all the electrical components.

You probably have a better chance of winning on the slot machine than cheating on it.

Iris scanner hack

In order to get through an iris scanner on a door, Jack gets a close up picture of the target’s eye. Then Bozer prints out a fake lens to wear over the eye. Could this work? It’s possible.

In fact, check this out. Someone did the same thing with the Samsung Galaxy S8.

Handheld Cellphone Stingray

A cellphone stingray is a device that acts like a cell tower. Cell phones connect to it thinking that it’s just a tower—but blam, it’s actually another computer.

Of course the details are complicated (which means I don’t really understand them), but you would need some type of antenna. Jack has a tiny antenna in his cuff that has to get close enough to the target’s phone. I think this is plausible. At least it would give Riley a chance to get into the phone and steal some codes.

Magnetic Detector

Also known as a compass. MacGyver is trying to find a magnetic switch for a hidden door. He grabs a bit of metal (hopefully it’s ferromagnetic steel) along with a magnetic bottle opener.

The basic idea is that a metal like steel (most steel) has magnetic domains. When these domains are lined up, the material will act like a magnet. You can line up the domains by rubbing the steel with a magnet. Like this.

If the magnetized steel can float, it will rotate and point in the direction of an external magnetic field—either from the Earth or from that magnetic door switch.

OK, one small issue. In the episode it shows MacGyver rubbing the steel back and forth. You really just want to rub it one way. I think it would still work though. Oh, also many of those magnets like the one on the bottle opener have weird domains. They aren’t just like a plain north and south of a bar magnet, but it still might work.

Vacuum Cleaner Spider-Man

This is awesome (and mostly real).

Here’s how it works. The vacuum cleaner works by pulling air out of a region. If you put a vacuum cleaner over carpet, the air flow goes from the carpet to the vacuum cleaner (basically with just a super powerful fan). When the air moves in this manner, it often picks up other stuff—like dirt.

MacGyver has this vacuum hooked up to some metal tray covers. When the air is pulled from these covers, the air pressure inside the covers decreases. That means that the external pressure (due to the Earth’s atmosphere) will push the covers onto the glass wall.

Actually, this force from the atmospheric pressure can be quite large. The pressure is $10^5\text{ N/m}^2$. So if the pressure inside the covers is just half an atmosphere with a radius of 10 cm, then the net force (for the two covers) would be:

$F = PA=(0.5\text{ N/m}^2)(2)(\pi (.1\text{ m})^2) = 3141 \text{ N}$

That’s some serious force. But wait! This is not the force that supports MacGyver. In fact, it is the frictional force between the cover and glass that keeps him from falling. The frictional force is an interaction between two surfaces that acts parallel to the surface. It depends on two things:

• The types of materials interacting.
• The magnitude of the force that pushes these two surfaces together.

If you push two surfaces together really hard, there will be a greater frictional force. So, this force from the vacuum cleaner exerts a force that increases the frictional force and this frictional force allows MacGyver to climb like Spider-Man.

Here is something similar with a guy that hangs from an overhang with a vacuum cleaner. Pretty cool.

Shrinking metal

This is real (based on something real). Yes, you can actually make metal things smaller. Here is a great video from Physics Girl (Dianna Cowern) that shows how this works.

The basic idea is to create a HUGE electric current very quickly. This large change in current can create a very high change in magnetic fields. When you put metal in this high changing magnetic field, it induces an electric current in the object. This induced current creates a magnetic field that interacts with the external magnetic field in such a way that the device gets squished. It’s awesome. Oh, when I say “a large change in magnetic field”, I am actually talking about the time derivative of the magnetic flux.

So, what do you need to make this coin shrink thing work? You just need super high current super fast. The best way to do this is to charge up some big capacitors and then discharge them through some wires. That’s essentially what MacGyver does.

The biggest problem is his capacitor. He builds one using two roulette wheels. Like this.

Yes. Any two metal devices can create a capacitor—but you want one with a large surface area and very close together. If you turned the two tables around so the flat side was close to the other one, it would be better—but it’s still a capacitor (but not really big enough for this job). Still, the idea is solid.

# MacGyver Season 2 Episode 1 Science Notes: DIY or DIE

I’m kicking myself. I should have been writing these MacGyver notes for each episode as they aired on TV. But no. I had to make things more complicated. Well, here I am—starting the notes for season 2.

Let’s just jump in. Note: there’s some pretty good stuff in this one.

MacGyver takes a button from his shirt and breaks it in half. From this half button he sharpens the edge so that it can cut through a rope.

I wouldn’t normally include this one in the blog since there’s not much science to talk about—but I’m just excited.

Flare-based harpoon and winch.

MacGyver takes a metal rod and puts it in an empty dip stick tube from an engine. He adds the powder from a road flare to act as a propellant. This would then launch the improvised harpoon forward.

Once the harpoon is stuck into a fleeing car, Mac wraps the cable around the horizontal axle on the sidecar to a motorcycle. As the axle spins, the cable wraps around it and pulls the motorcycle closer to the car.

Mini gun as a starter motor.

They need a car. MacGyver finds one—but it’s missing a starter motor. Really, there is nothing super special about a starter motor. It’s just a DC motor that is strong enough to turn over the engine so that it can turn itself (using gasoline).

The mini gun also uses an electric motor. In this case, the motor spins a combination of gun barrels so that the fire rate can be higher than a normal machine gun.

Could you use one motor for another application? Theoretically, yes. The only tough part might be mounting the motor (which MacGyver does with some wire—wire is often better than duck tape). The other problem is making sure the gears on the motor match up with the gears on the car to turn over the motor—but it’s still possible.

Run up a wall with a pole

Sometimes, there are hacks that look too crazy to be true—but in fact would totally work. Here is an example of such a hack.

MacGyver and friends take a long pole. MacGyver gets on one end near a wall and the other two push the pole towards the wall. This allows MacGyver to walk up the wall.

But wait! Here is a video of this trick being used in real life by a Vietnamese SWAT team.

Here is my super short explanation.

• If you push someone against a vertical wall, there will be a frictional force pushing UP.
• If the push is great enough, this upward frictional force can be equal to the gravitational force.
• Boom. That means a person can walk up a wall.

Here is a force diagram of that situation.

Oh, I also made a video to show you how this works.

Cell phone in a soccer ball.

Ok, you can put a camera in a ball and kick it through a window. Not really much of a hack, but clever.

Improvised diver propulsion vehicle.

MacGyver needs to get through a submerged passage—it’s long enough that he can’t swim the whole way. This means he needs some scuba stuff. In particular, he needs the following:

• Some type of air supply with a regulator.
• A mask and some type of mouthpiece to breath.
• A light.
• A DPV—diver propulsion vehicle.

Please forgive me, but I’m going to go over more detail in this case that you would like. I can’t help it. MacGyver is basically cave diving—this is something that I used to do quite a bit.

Just to show you what that was like, here is an older picture of me. It’s not cave diving, but it’s using all of the same gear (it was practice).

Let’s start with the scuba gear. MacGyver doesn’t have a regular scuba tank, so he uses an oxygen tank used for welding. You don’t normally want to use oxygen for scuba—you want to use air (which is only 21% oxygen). You see, oxygen is actually toxic. If you breath oxygen at high pressure, it can do bad stuff to you. Fortunately, MacGyver is going to use this at very shallow depths—he should be fine. Also, he won’t need to much gas as you consume much more at greater depths (for open circuit systems like scuba).

What is a regulator? Suppose you have a pressurized tank at 1000 psi. You can’t really breath air (or any gas) at that pressure (although there are some tricks—ask me later and I can tell you about this). That’s where the regulator comes in. It takes pressure from the tank and reduces it to the ambient pressure. That’s really important. It has to deliver the pressure at the same pressure around the human. If it was too low, you wouldn’t be able to expand your lungs and breath.

Luckily, they have regulators for welding stuff too. You need a second regulator to let air out only when you breath—but it’s possible to build one of these (they are much simpler).

Now for the DPV. These things are very useful in cave diving. How are you supposed to get 5,000 feet back in a cave if you have to swim the whole way? The early DPV (or scooters as we called them) were essentially trolling motors from a bass fishing boat connected to a battery.

Just about any electric motor with a battery could work. Ideally, the motor should be sealed so it can run underwater—but it doesn’t have to be perfect. It only has to work for a short time.

I really like the scooter in the episode. It really looks like a home built scooter.

OK, you can’t see it too well in that image—just trust me. Or better yet, watch the episode.

I also like how MacGyver side mounts his tank. Even if you have done normal scuba diving, you might be surprised at how these tanks behave underwater. Just because they are heavy out of water doesn’t mean they will pull you down underwater. Very often we would bring extra tanks (stage bottles) in a cave and carry them on our side just like MacGyver did.

Parkour Wall Jump.

MacGyver gets to run up a wall twice in this episode. Just like the wall run with the pole, this case also uses friction. It’s your classic parkour wall run-jump.

If you run towards a wall and push yourself back, there is a force between you and the wall. The faster you run, the greater the force. If this force is great enough, there will be a large enough upward frictional force so that you can get an extra upward jump.

That’s exactly what MacGyver does to get out of the tunnel. Here is a more detailed WIRED post on this wall jump.

# MacGyver Season 3 Episode 17 Science Notes: Seeds + Permafrost + Feather

The Seed Vault is real

It’s basically a giant insurance policy. Suppose something terrible happens and a bunch of crops are wiped out. What then? How do you start over? Yes, you go to the seed bank and withdraw your seeds.

https://www.croptrust.org/our-work/svalbard-global-seed-vault/

Feather to detect air currents

MacGyver pulls a feather out of his jacket and uses this to detect air currents. This should work since the feather will move due to super tiny air motion that would be too small for a human to feel.

This reminds me of a job I once had. The job was to go to people’s swimming pools and find leaks. I would take a small squeeze bottle with red dye and let out tiny amounts into the water to see what would happen. If the red dye got sucked into the wall—there’s your leak. Oh, this was done with scuba gear so that I could stay underwater for long periods of time. It was extremely boring.

Finding position from a smartphone accelerometer

Your phone has an accelerometer (probably). At the very least, this accelerometer is used to determine the orientation of the phone so that it knows if you are taking a normal video or a vertical video (don’t do vertical videos).

This accelerometer is essentially a tiny mass on a spring (but not an actual spring). When the phone accelerates, the spring gets compressed by an amount that is proportional to the acceleration. That’s how you get the acceleration. Once you have the acceleration, you can integrate twice to the get the change in position of the phone (assuming the phone started from rest). If you keep doing this every tenth of a second (or whatever time frame you want), you can track the location of the phone. True.

In fact, if you use the augmented reality (AR) on your phone then you have to use the accelerometer. Your phone figures looks at a surface from different viewpoints to figure out how far away it is. The different viewpoints are determined by the motion of the phone and the accelerometer.

Just because it’s cool—here is my short explanation of AR on the phone.

Toxic Pea

Can you actually make a toxin from a pea seed? Yup. That’s possible. In fact, there are a bunch of things out there in the real world that have some pretty deadly stuff in them. Here are some options.

Directional satellite dish

If you have a normal wifi antenna on your computer (and you probably do), it basically just transmits radio waves in all directions. It’s not a completely uniform signal strength in all directions, but let’s just assume it is.

Imagine these radio waves expanding out and forming a sphere. Since the area of the this radio wave sphere is proportional to the square of the radius, the signal power decreases with distance. That’s just how it works.

But wait! What if you redirect these waves into one direction? That would increase the radio power along that direction and give you a better signal. However, you now have to aim this thing.

There are several methods to make a directional antenna. The two common methods are to use a parabolic dish (like a satellite dish) or a wave guide. The wave guide uses a tube with an antenna located at a certain point. Waves go down the tube and then reflect to constructively interfere and make the signal stronger in that direction.

# MacGyver Season 1 Episode 18 Science Notes: Flashlight

Hold on. There’s a metric butt ton of science in this episode. It’s going to be great.

Turning bullet

SPOILER ALERT. This episode has a bullet that can turn. It’s sort of the key plot element in this episode. These dudes are trying to steal the technology for these “smart bullets”. These bullets are essentially tiny guided missiles with fins so that they can turn in flight.

I’ll just leave this Wikipedia link on smart bullets and then move on (it’s not really a MacGyver hack anyway).

The physics of birthdays

Again, not a hack—but MacGyver thinks birthdays are dumb. Well, not dumb but arbitrary. I think he is right. In fact, I use the following phrase on people’s birthday’s:

Happy Solar Orbit Day.

Yes, that is the day the person completes another orbit around the Sun. I like thinking of it that way.

Fixing a generator inverter

There are lots of different types of generators. Most of them involve a gasoline engine that turns stuff. Some times this turning stuff involves a magnet to make an electric current. But what happens when the magnet get’s messed up? Yes, you have to fix it.

A permanent magnet is a ferromagnetic object (like iron) in which all the magnetic domains are aligned. If the domains are not aligned then it would just act like a dumb piece of metal. You can get the domains align by applying a strong magnetic field.

This is exactly what MacGyver does to the generator. He uses a defibrillator to generate the current and forms a loop of wire to create the strong external magnetic field. Seems like it could work.

DIY sand blaster

How do you get people out of a collapsed building? What if you could just cut through the wall? Yes, that’s the MacGyver plan.

In this case, he uses high pressure water mixed with sand—a type of sand blaster. If you have water at a high enough pressure, it can pretty much cut through anything. Of course MacGyver’s water by itself isn’t fast enough. That’s where the sand comes in. When the sand hits the concrete, the abrasive interaction is enough to eat away at the concrete.

Oh, this would take quite a while to work.

Yes, this is a real thing. NASA made this device. Here is a description. Basically, this thing sends out microwaves and detects the reflected microwaves. But the magic is that it only looks for variations in reflections caused by small oscillations—these oscillations are from a human heart.

For MacGyver’s version, he starts with a radar gun (from a police car). These don’t use the same frequency as the microwave detector, but he can make a modification. With some software from Riley, that’s pretty much what he needs to get started. It’s at least plausible.

Screw jack

How do you lift super heavy stuff? You need a simple machine. All of the simple machines deal with force and distance. If you can increase the distance over which you apply a force, you can get a greater output force over a shorter distance.

In this case, MacGyver makes a screw jack. You can lift a large mass by turning the screw to get it to extend. In fact, you could do something like this yourself. Here’s how.

Ascender rig

The goal of an ascender rig is to allow some device to move UP a rope, but not down. This means you can climb up a rope one little bit at a time. Here is an example.

Oh, MacGyver made an ascender rig to climb an elevator cable and escape a collapsed building.

Modify laser

The smart bullet is aimed using a laser. Of course the bullet is only a little bit smart. It only aims towards the brightest laser. If you could make another laser that gets the attention of the bullet, you can get the bullet off course.

MacGyver takes the laser sight off a pistol. In order to increase the power output, he burns off a potentiometer. This could work on some lasers—like this.

Oh, DON’T DO THIS. You don’t want a powerful laser without knowing what it can do. These lasers can seriously damage your eyes in ways you wouldn’t be able to predict. Remember, you only have two eyes. Don’t mess them up.

So, they use this powerful laser to redirect a smart bullet. That part is plausible. It’s unlikely they could get a bullet to turn all the way around. They wouldn’t have time to move the laser dot and the bullet fins couldn’t make it turn that much.

Who cares. It was still a great episode.

# MacGyver Season 3 Episode 15 Science Notes: K9 + Smugglers + New Recruit

Dog nose

Dog’s are pretty awesome for smelling stuff. They have noses that are much more sensitive than a human and they are smart enough to be trained. Oh, also they are dogs—so that’s an extra bonus. Dogs can detect more than guns. When trained, they can sniff out drugs or even some humans with particular medical conditions. Pretty awesome.

Here is a nice PBS article on the science of dog noses. Oh, this isn’t actually a MacGyver hack. I guess that’s clear though.

Wall climb

Again, not a MacGyver hack. Instead, there is a scene in which Desi (yes, Desi is the new recruit) runs and uses a corner of two walls to climb on top of a storage container.

So, how the heck do you run up a wall? The answer is “friction” and “momentum”. Let’s start with friction.

When two surfaces interact, there can be a frictional force. This force is parallel to the surfaces and proportional the perpendicular force that pushes the two surfaces together (we call this the normal force). If you put a book on a flat table, you can feel that frictional force as you try to slide the book. If you push DOWN on the book while trying to pull it, the frictional force will increase.

Since you have a vertical wall, it’s possible to have an upward frictional force to prevent Desi from falling down. However, there needs to be a force pushing Desi INTO the wall in order to have a significant perpendicular force. Actually, try this yourself. Take that same book you had on the table. Now put it on a vertical wall and let go. Yes. It falls. There is nothing pushing the book into the wall so there is no frictional force.

Now for momentum. Momentum (represented by “p”) is the product of an object’s (or human’s) mass and velocity where the velocity is a vector (depends on both the speed and the direction). Momentum is important in its relationship to the net force on an object. Here, we have the momentum principle:

$\vec{F}_\text{net} = \frac{\Delta \vec{p}}{\Delta t}$

So, what happens when Desi runs TOWARDS a wall and pushes off? The direction of her momentum changes from towards the wall to away from the wall. This change in momentum means there must be a force on her. Yes, this force comes from the wall. The faster she runs towards the wall, the greater her change in momentum and the larger the normal force.

This means a large normal force also produces a large frictional force. The frictional force is high enough to prevent Desi from falling while in contact with the wall. In fact, it’s a large enough force for her to move UP the wall. Of course, she is also now moving away from the wall. This is where the second wall comes into play. Now she just does the same this with that other corner wall. Physics.

Smoke screen

MacGyver needs a distraction. He takes some gun oil (used to trick the dog) and pours it into the engine of a forklift. When the fork lift starts, it is now running with extra oil in the fuel. This oil produces a blue-white smoke that comes out the exhaust. Yes, you have seen this with cars. It’s a bad sign that there is oil leaking into the engine cylinders.

The next thing that MacGyver does is to cut the fuel line. This pours extra diesel onto the hot engine. Theoretically, it could catch fire. Theoretically, this fire could cause an explosion. In theory.

DIY dog whistle

Yes, you can indeed make a whistle from a stick. Some sticks are easier than others—but still…

What makes a dog whistle different than a whistle? It’s really just the fundamental frequency that it blows. A normal whistle has a lower frequency that human ears are good at detecting. The dog whistle has a much higher frequency that most humans can’t hear.

Oh, what about the plastic bag? Yes, MacGyver gets a plastic bag and attaches this to the whistle. This makes an improvised bellows. The idea is that you can fill it up with air and then push the air out at a greater rate than just blowing. It makes the whistle louder than normal.

RFID detection

Cody (the dog) has an RFID chip in him. The basic idea behind a passive RFID is that you can excite it with a radio wave such that it transmits some data (like an ID). Oh, but you have to get pretty close for this to work. Here is a nice RFID tutorial.

Now for the MacGyver hack. In order to find Cody with his RFID, they need two things. First, they need a method to activate the passive RFID at a long range. To do this you need lots of power. That’s where the AM radio station comes in. If you use a nearby radio transmitter, it could activate a bunch of RFID tags. This is fairly plausible. No, you wouldn’t “hear” anything—it would just broadcast a particular frequency that the RFID uses.

The second thing—something to detect the RFID signal from a range. That’s why you need a satellite dish. The parabolic dish reflects weak radio signals into the detector. Of course this only works if you are pointing it in the right direction. So, you need to sweep this over some area until you get a signal. Once you find the dog you want, you have to use the dish to zero in on the location.

Disabling a car

What can you do to prevent a car from driving? Yes, there is the classic banana up a tail pipe trick (from Beverly Hills Cop), but how about something different?

OK, I admit this is a bit of a stretch. However, if you can make some sort of electromagnetic pulse device then it can interfere with the car’s electronic system.

That’s “essentially” what MacGyver does here. Let’s just leave it at that.

Foam fire extinguisher

How do you put out a fire? One way is to remove oxygen from the fire. Without oxygen, the fire can’t burn. This is essentially what a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher does. It shoots out carbon dioxide gas which displaces the oxygen and the fire goes out.

You can make a foam-based fire extinguisher that essentially does the same thing. The only difference is that the carbon dioxide is trapped in the foam. This means that you can cover some stuff with the foam and it should put out the fire.

Now for the fun part. You can make fire extinguishing foam with three things: vinegar, baking soda, liquid soap.

When you mix baking soda and vinegar, it produces carbon dioxide. If you add soap to the vinegar, then it also bubbles. This is not too difficult to try (but it can get messy).

# MacGyver Season 1 Episode 17 Science Notes: Ruler

Propane tank flame thrower

Take a propane tank and bicycle tube. Cut the bike tire to make it a hose and connect it to the propane tank. Use a road flare to light the gas—boom. There is your flame thrower.

Oh but wait. It’s just a dream. Bozer’s dream. The flame thrower wasn’t real anyway.

Listen in on a landline phone

Who uses a landline now anyway? Oh well. They want to use a landline then it’s possible to listen in. Actually, this isn’t even that difficult. Check it out.

Here is another version.

You just need a capacitor and maybe an inductor. You could grab these from a radio or something like that.

But wait. I made a mistake. While going over this hack, I said something like this:

“Yeah, this is pretty easy. Just get the capacitor and earpiece (or radio) and then tie it into the wiring box”

Here’s what that looks like.

I just want to point out this small mistake (that you would never notice) just in case you saw it. You don’t actually “tie” the lines—that’s just a term we use in circuits to mean “connect”.

There’s a bomb in the truck. Where should you park it so that no one gets hurt? Yeah, this is a tough calculation. However, tough has never stopped MacGyver before and it won’t stop him now.

Here is my rough calculation and explaination.

Bombs are complicated. But usually it is the pressure produced by the explosion that will get you. We can come up with some pretty useful models to calculate their impact. First, there is the Hopkinson-Cranz Scaling Law (this is a real thing). With this law, the acceptable distance can be calculated based on the explosive weight.

$\mathrm{Range} = (z)(\mathrm{weight})^(1/3)$

In this expression z is a factor that depends on the type of distance with 14.8 being the distance factor for a public traffic route. That means that 2 kilograms would need 18.6 meters (60 feet).

Infrared face jammer

OK, it doesn’t actually jam your face. That would be weird. MacGyver wants to prevent the security cameras from recognizing their faces. So he takes some infrared TV removes and pulls out the IR LED lights. Normally these flash on and off so that the sensor on the TV can “see them” but humans can’t.

He mounts these IR LED lights on some sun glasses with a battery to power them. When a security camera sees the face, it just gets blinded by the IR light since many video cameras can also detect IR.

If your phone camera doesn’t have an IR filter (most now do) then you can actually see the light flashing on a TV remote by pointing it at your phone.

Oh, so this could really work. It just depends on the type of video cameras. Some people even put stuff like this on their car license plate so that police cameras can’t see them.

Car jacking

How do you open a locked car door? One way is to jam a wedge into the door. This will pull the door out just a little (by bending it) so that you can get a stick in there. The stick then can be used to push the “lock” button.

In this case, MacGyver uses something for the wedge—maybe a shoe horn or a door stop. Then a monopod is extended to click the lock button.

DIY soldering iron

You might have missed this one. But as MacGyver is building his stuff for the last mission, he needs a soldering iron. He takes the heating element out of a hair dryer and connects it to some stuff. That works.

Fake noses

Need a disguise? How about DIY latex to make a nose? Yes, this seems plausible. Here’s how to do it.

MacGyver makes a quick circuit board that can crack a keypad by using a brute force method that goes through all the combinations. This is from a different episode, but it’s the same idea.

If you want to play with one yourself, here is an online version of the code.

Well, it’s just a radio. MacGyver needs a speaker and a transmitter. Really, a radio transmitter is essentially the same thing as a radio receiver—OK, not really but sort of.

Instead of going over the way MacGyver did it, how about a real actual radio you could build yourself? Here is a spark gap transmitter from simple parts (and awesome).

Here is a more detailed explanation of the spark gap transmitter from one of my WIRED posts.

# MacGyver Season 1 Episode 15 Science Notes: Magnifying Glass

It’s too late to change now—but I wish I had planned better for my titles for these science notes. I just don’t like the way it looks. Oh well. On to the science.

Jumping out of window with a TV cable

MacGyver yanks a TV cable from the wall and ties it around him. Then boom—he’s out of the second story window to catch a bad guy. As he falls, the cable gets pulled from the wall and sort of prevents him from a full force impact with the ground.

Electrostatic dust print lifter

Electrostatic dust print lifters are indeed real. Here is an example of a real one.

The basic idea is to take a conducting sheet and lay it on top of the area where you want to find a print (finger print or shoe print). When a large electric field is applied, the dust literally gets lifted and stuck to the conducting sheet. Boom. There is your print. Oh, you need about 800 volts to get a high enough electric field (according to one paper that is no longer online for some reason).

For the MacGyver version, he uses some mylar for the sheet. In order to create the large electric field, he can use the charging capacitor for the flash in a disposable camera. That might not get up to 800 volts, but it’s a good start. Yes, it’s also true that you can get fairly high voltages just by rubbing two different materials together—as long as the air is dry. This is exactly what happens when you rub your feet across a carpeted floor and then shock the bejeezus out of someone. Same idea.

One more thing. The official version of the electrostatic dust print lifter is pretty expensive. But someone made one for just 50 dollars using a stun gun. Here is the hackaday.com link, but it looks like the original post has link rotted.

Just to show you some more electrostatic stuff—here are some demos that you could try.

Open an envelope with steam from a radiator

Yup, this works.

Wifi wall detector

OK, it doesn’t detect walls. Instead, the wifi can find empty spaces behind walls. MacGyver takes a wifi router with a partially parabolic dish (using aluminum foil) over the antenna. He then connects the output to a speaker (for a cool effect).

Yes, wifi is essentially a radio wave (it is a radio wave). Radio waves mostly pass through walls—but you have wifi in your house and you know that sometimes you don’t get a great signal. This shows that wifi is at least partially blocked by walls. The wifi can also reflect off stuff.

It is this reflected wifi that MacGyver uses to find the hidden room. When there is nothing on the back side of a wall, you don’t get a good reflected signal and that changes the sound of the connected speaker.

OK, this probably wouldn’t work—but it’s still based on this idea that wifi can interact with walls in different ways. Anyway, MIT has created a tool to use wifi to see through walls. Note, this show came out before that. I’m not saying MIT based that wifi thing on this episodes. I’m just sayin.

Movie film roll for distracting fire

MacGyver takes one of those movie film rolls. Adds some stuff and then lights it on fire. When he rolls it down to the front of the movie theater—boom. Distracting explosion. Yeah, lots of stuff burns. No problem here.