It’s Mythbusters day again, and this time Adam and Jamie are testing the strength of duct tape in some rather interesting ways. Like using it to lift up a car, for example. This is a pretty cool demo, but there’s one thing that irked me: on the show, there was quite a bit of speculation along the lines of “Can duct tape really hold up a car?” Yes, in fact, duct tape can hold up anything, if you use enough of it. As they suggested in the show, when you’re using strips of tape (or string etc.) to hold up an object, the total force required is split among all the different strips of tape, and if your strips are approximately evenly distributed (in some particular sense), the force is approximately evenly split. With 100 strips of duct tape lifting a 5000 pound car, that’s an average of about 50 pounds per strip, which is reasonably within the limit that Adam and Jamie found (albeit somewhat unscientifically) — even accounting for the fact that some strips are carrying more weight than others.