MIT scientist shows that Archimedes death ray in 200 BC was possible.

[NNadir]

"Did Archimedes really produce a death ray 2,200 years ago? According to Greek and Roman historians, he set Roman warships afire with a polished mirror that focused the sun’s rays from afar during the siege of Syracuse. Last year the Discovery Channel program "MythBusters" declared the story a myth after failing to reproduce the feat.

The program intrigued David Wallace, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When he presented the death ray as an offbeat project for his class in product development, he said, "only a small number thought it was technically possible."

On Oct. 4 on the roof of M.I.T.’s West Garage, the class set up 127 cheap one-square foot mirrors 100 feet from a wooden mock up of the side of a ship. Clouds dogged the experiment, but with just 10 minutes of clear sky, the "ship" burst into flames..."


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/science/18find.html

http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/lectures/10_ArchimedesResult.html

As many may know, Archimedes was an scientist of antiquity who almost certainly ranked with the likes of Newton and Einstein. Many of his works have been lost; but there is some evidence that he invented calculus almost 2000 years before Newton and Leibniz repeated the feat. When Newton remarked "I have stood on the shoulders of giants," he was speaking of Archimedes.

Archimedes invented the Archimedian screw, a pumping device that still finds wide use today in many technological devices.

Archimedes was prevailed upon to become of the first weapons scientists, and his machinery was used to hold off the Roman attack on Syracuse by Marcellus. Eventually Syracuse fell. Archimedes was allegedly murdered by a Roman soldier sent to get him when Archimedes rebuked the soldier for stepping on the sandbox that Archimedes used as modern people would use a blackboard.

Because of this development, I would like to suggest that solar mirrors be banned as a potential instrument of war.

[Spinzonner]

1. That's a bright idea

[NNadir]

2. Groan...

[Geoff R. Casavant]

3. I will reflect on your proposal.

n/t

[NNadir]

4. More groans...

You guys are not shining any light on this matter.

This kind of burns me up, but I certainly don't want to get in a flame war with you. I mean, the topic is hot, even if it's Greek to some people. But again, let's not have a heated exchange. Probably our ideas mirror each other's and therefore our dispositions should be sunny.

I mean, just because we're talking about Archimedes, there is no reason to get screwy. Let's try to stay light hearted and desist from further punishing.

[SteppingRazor]

6. I think your post strays from the topic at hand...

quit Roman.

[NNadir]

8. I guess I should ship out.

Oar is there a ray of hope that we can end this. I would start beaming if we could.

[SteppingRazor]

9. I think you sea my point n/t

[Canuckistanian]

5. Sounds possible in theory

But almost impossible to implement. A parabolic mirror with a focal length of say, hundreds of feet could be produced, but the accuracy of the mirror would have to be exacting even by modern methods.

[NNadir]

7. In the MIT link, they used simple flat mirrors. They worked.

It's in the link. (The MIT link.)

[Ready4Change]

10. Reportedly Archimides used polished shields.

Most likely bronze. Given troop control and discipline of the day he probably could have drilled a thousand or so troops for this effect.

However, I'm still not sold. Reason being that sheilds are typically convex, curved outwards. This would disperse each sheilds reflected light so much they'd be ineffective, no matter how well drilled the troops were.

Anyone know if sheilds of the day were curved or flat?

[NNadir]

11. I would expect that the authors - the winners - may have interpreted

what Archimedes used as being "shields" - but this may have extended from their own ignorance and not what Archimedes actually did.

He could have easily used flat iron or even finely hammered silver supported on some other metal.

Archimedes was a one of the most important scientists of all time and certainly if he accomplished what is reported, he would have had some experimental background. He would have discarded the use of convex shields for that purpose pretty quickly on the grounds they didn't work well. Probably he was looking to scale up something he had already seen, albeit with a much smaller system.

The Romans, on the other hand, would have had no experience with the use of flat pieces (or even concave pieces) of metal and, lacking a word in latin, may have simply said "shields" when they saw them. Since they were military brutes in the Roman army, because they were engaged in looting, pillage, and murder - even the murder of Archimedes himself - they may not have found out the details of what the actual system was after the conquest. They may have killed most of the people who knew the finer details.

I tend to believe that the story is not completely apocryphal. As a weapon it may have not been very effective, simply because there were many ships, and probably they moved often, and, the mirrors were difficult to operate. But I can believe that the Syracusans may have pulled it off once or twice. We know that Marcellus had a profound respect for Archimedes, and wept and grieved greatly when he found what that one of his soldiers had executed the great man. As Marcellus was a general and not necessarily a thinker, the grief may have come from respect for a very wily and powerful enemy.

Because we understand optics, we know that it is possible. It is a lot to expect that people who had little knowledge of optics could invent a story from nowhere in which the application of optics was essential.

[enlightenment]

13. The scutum, or shield,

could be either curved or flat. It tended to vary by period -- in the early part of the 4th century BCE, the Romans used a flat oval shield; later, they started to curve it, and eventually it became more of a curved rectangle. But, they were back to using a flat oval in the 3rd century AD. The battle was about the same time Archimedes died, 212 BCE -- so my guess was that they were using both curved and flat.
Not that I know anything about military history (just a little about Greeks and Romans in general).

[htuttle]

12. Found this link today -- it says it *didn't* work

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051023/ap_on_sc/archimedes_death_ray;_ylt=AnoBoUeey.1A2H8UZHX3d.qs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MzV0MTdmBHNlYwM3NTM-

It was on the front page of yahoo this morning for some reason.

Tests of Fabled Archimedes Death Ray Fail

SAN FRANCISCO - It wasn't exactly the ancient siege of Syracuse, but rather a curious quest for scientific validation. According to sparse historical writings, the Greek mathematician Archimedes torched a fleet of invading Roman ships by reflecting the sun's powerful rays with a mirrored device made of glass or bronze.

More than 2,000 years later, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona set out to recreate Archimedes' fabled death ray Saturday in an experiment sponsored by the Discovery Channel program "MythBusters." Their attempts to set fire to an 80-year-old fishing boat using their own versions of the device, however, failed to either prove or dispel the myth of the solar death ray.

The MIT team's first attempt with their contraption made of 300 square feet of bronze and glass failed to ignite a fire from 150 feet away. It produced smoldering on the boat's wooden surface but no open flame. A second attempt from about 75 feet away lit only a small fire that burned itself out.

Mike Bushroe of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory tried a mirrored system shaped like flower petals, but it failed to produce either smoke or flames.

(more at link)

There's no disagreement that they started a fire, but there seems to be some disagreement as to how big the fire was.

[northzax]

14. EUREKA!

let's not forget that Archimedes is also credited with devising a workable value for pi, determining the volume of a sphere (for which, of course, he needed pi 4/3pir^3) as well as the principle of bouyancy and displacement.

not too shabby, eh? and it was common for mathmeticians to devise weapons of war at the time, just as it is now. I don't think much of a fire would have been neccesary to scare the shit out of an invading fleet (not to mention the blindess caused by anyone who looked at the light) pretty much a badass.