I'd like to point out that that as a would be thieve it comes down to luck, as there is no way to distinguish iPhones by storage....
*joke*
Whether they're geniuses or not is irrelevant. They are scientists by any definition of the word. And like all scientists, they document and publish their work. If you want to play the science game, then if you have results that contradict their published work, then you are welcome to publish a rebuttal. The fact that in OVER A DECADE no one has done so, I believe, is telling.
Because it's important to state one's position up front in these forums to avoid arguing about completely irrelevant topics: I'm not suggesting we're all going to die in fireballs at the gas pump. I also tend to side with
Zombie Feynman in the Mythbusters debate (and string theory, for that matter).
Be that as it may, I also agree that they fail at basic rigor. I think Zombie Feynman sets a pragmatically low bar for our society at testing beliefs by experiment-- it's also important to know what exactly the results of your experiment prove. That's where Mythbusters fails science in pursuit of entertainment. They give a verdict of "Busted" and state that "no cell phone will ever cause a gas station to ignite", when all they've really shown is that they couldn't get one function (ring) of one sample of one 2004 phone model to cause a fire in a small, indoor, enclosed blast chamber without a pump or a car.
They have extrapolated a law of nature from a single data point without supporting theory.
To quote Jaimie from the cell phone episode (which, full disclosure, I own) as Adam sets up the phone in the blast chamber: "Well let me see... We've got a crash test dummy with his legs removed. We've got a panty static generator with leopard fur and panties wrapped around it. It's not exactly hard science."
So no, Mythbusters didn't prove anything about phones at gas stations-- or rather they proved one small thing in such an enormous sample space that it rounds down to nothing. Then they redirected blame to static electricity, which they say can cause a fire even though they couldn't get that to work either. They had to blow it up with a neon lighting transformer.
That's why I said I place more faith in the Snopes article. They dig into the data and report on what is essentially a large number of natural experiments done in many places, by many devices, with no recorded events. They also question experts in both cell phones and petroleum who all come back saying they don't consider it a threat.
Snopes also hasn't proven it impossible (and we know that cell phones have gone up in flames due to battery failures, for example, which could cause a gas station to ignite) but they've supported the theory that the risk is vanishingly small-- which is all we can hope for in life.
