We should point out that if we feel like we've upset somebody and they're vitriolic, if people are actively pursuing some sort of complaint, then we've done our job.

We're constantly pushing these materials and processes to the extreme to see what will happen. It's an insight into things that you don't normally see.

There are a lot of times when we can just time something and say "busted" or "confirmed" or whatever, instead of building a robot or some gadget to make it happen more elaborately. In those cases, we're simply enjoying ourselves.

One of the things I'm likely to start building in my shop is a vehicle wherein each wheel has basically a flight-simulator base as its suspension. It's known as a hexapod; it's basically a tripod but each leg is two pistons. So you have six axes of freedom on it. This will be something that can not only do what lowriders do, but shorten or extend its wheelbase and jump forwards, backwards, or from one side to the other. In an off-road situation it could be rolling at speed toward a ravine and then leap across it.

If it turns out that we're doing proper science from time to time, it just happens to be that that's the most efficient way of doing it. We go into each of these stories with an open mind, and one of the great things about how the show works is that we're not approaching it from a doctoral point of view, we're just trying to see what happens.

Any day we create that much shrapnel is a good day.

We should point out that if we feel like we've upset somebody and they're vitriolic, if people are actively pursuing some sort of complaint, then we've done our job.