Hands-On MythBusters Exhibit Now at Liberty Science Center

Steve Adubato goes one-on-one with Liberty Science Center's President & CEO, Paul Hoffman, about some of the fun and new exhibits at the Center, including MythBusters featuring hands-on experiences and live demonstrations.

1/19/17 #2005

Excerpt:

"Paul Hoffman is the President and Chief Executive Officer of a great organization called the Liberty Science Center, based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Jersey City. Almost on the bank of the Hudson, we're on the edge of Liberty State Park right opposite Battery Park. I mean, thousands and thousands of school age children and others go there all the time to see what kinds of things? All sorts of things. So we have live animals, 110 species, including tamron monkeys. We have aquariums of fish we've pulled out of the Hudson. 80 pound drum fish that my staff has caught right there. We have things that deal with engineering, how skyscrapers are constructed. You're looking at the Freedom Tower and all of Lower Manhattan. Wow. And you can understand the construction. It's all interactive. It's all stuff you can do and participate in. Paul tell us about this. We're gonna see some video of the MythBusters Exhibit. Tell us about it. Yeah, so this opens on February 18th, and will be there through September. And this is based on the MythBusters show. So you're actually gonna be able to test things. So you're gonna see, can a plane take off from a conveyer belt? You know. Wow. The conveyer belt's going this way, the plane's going the other. What about the rain? You have to get somewhere in the rain. [laughter] Do you get more wet if you run? Or if you walk? I mean, we often... Other things like that magicians do, trying to pull a tablecloth out from under dishware and glassware. Is that possible? What if the glasses are light? Is that better? If they're heavy? Is that better? So we have all these kind of things, some of them are things that people take for granted. If you drop toast, and it's buttered on one side, does it land on the butter? Or does it land on the other? We need to know these things Paul! Absolutely. It keeps me up late at night. And I'm not gonna tell you the answer, but if you come to the exhibit...[laughter] ...you'll be able to discover it for yourself! You're also a very good marketer. Always have been. That's how you get people to come there. The other thing that's fascinating to me is you were talking about this planetarium is it? Yeah. So you pass us on the... from the Holland Tunnel throughway extension, 23,000,000 cars go by there a year. That's right. We're the huge dome. In that dome is an IMAX film theater. I've been there. Now film... film's going out of style, our equipment is a film projector, it's past end of life, so we're turning that into a digital theater that we can show anything..."