MythBusters — S9 E14 "Newton's Crane Cradle" — Aired October 5, 2011

A viral video showed an enormous Newton's cradle built from wrecking balls, with one ball swinging into the row and transferring its energy cleanly through to launch the ball at the far end exactly the way the classic desk toy does at a tiny fraction of the scale, and Adam and Jamie decided to find out whether that same clean energy transfer holds up once you're dealing with two-thousand-pound concrete and steel spheres instead of polished metal balls the size of a golf ball, building five massive balls from cut naval buoys packed with rebar and concrete, rigging the whole thing up at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, and discovering that scaling up introduces energy losses that a tabletop version never has to deal with, before eventually learning something about the original video that changed the entire question they thought they were answering.

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Using science as their weapon and curiosity as their fuel, Hollywood special effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman spent 14 seasons and 296 episodes testing the world's most popular myths, urban legends, and movie moments. From the Diet Coke & Mentos explosion to surviving an underwater car escape — if it can be tested, they'll test it.

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