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Archimedes Death Ray

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the take-that-mythbusters dept.

Werner Heuser writes "Ancient Greek and Roman historians recorded that during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, Archimedes (a notably smart person) constructed a burning glass to set the Roman warships, anchored within bow and arrow range, afire. The story has been much debated and oft dismissed as myth ... Intrigued by the idea and an intuitive belief that it could work, MIT's 2.009ers decided to apply the early product development 'sketch or soft modeling' process to the problem."

6 of 584 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mythbusters by Shamashmuddamiq · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With all due respect, I don't think the Mythbusters are as smart as Archimedes was. You shouldn't impugn someone just because they lived a long time ago.

    --
    ...just my 2 gil.
  2. Re:Mythbusters by scdeimos · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Not to argue that the mythbusters are always right, but they've disproved this in one of thier episodes.

    Actually, they only disproved their own design and construction methods on this one. A properly-designed and -constructed working model was demonstrated on BBC Two's practical archeology programme, What The Ancients Did For Us

  3. Re:Fire good! by jericho4.0 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Doughtfull at best. The Antikythera Mechanism is probably only one of hudereds or thousands of devices that existed at the time, and many people could have been making, buying and useing similar items. Our knowledge of how the ancient Greeks (and others) actually lived is so fragmentary, and we tend to fill in all the blanks with the lowest common denominator answer, ie; we see no evidence of clockwork, therefore they had no clocks. Before the discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, the suggestion that the Greeks had clockwork would have been met with scorn.

    Yes, Archimedes was a very smart cookie, but he was surrounded by other smart cookies, who were also geting up to interesting things. IMO, ancient Greece was pretty much as technologicly advanced as 15th century Europe. Why we ended up having the industrial revolution, and the Greeks did not, becomes a very interesting question.

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  4. Does anyone else find myth busters annoying? by TummyX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They run these unscientific experiments (most involving explosions or decaying corpses) and then "conclusively bust" myths. Some experiments are fun and interesting, but most don't deserve the hard conclusions they assign.

    It's really annoying when people take accept their "proofs" as proofs.

  5. Re:Mythbusters by dangitman · · Score: 4, Insightful
    In the MIT experiment, the boat was arguably a very poor replica of a trireme. It was painted black to optimize the energy transfer (which in the end didn't matter).

    Why would the greeks have tried to set fire to the wood? It would me much easier to target the sails, and they would burn much more quickly. Once the sails are burning, the wood follows. I don't understand why modern people have such problems following logic, and instead have such faith in modern products, and complex solutions rather than simple ones.

    --
    ... and then they built the supercollider.
  6. Re:Maybe a combination of the 2 by Scrameustache · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I remember a Mythbuster episode where Adam & Jamie try to reproduce this myth/story. They were not able to set a boat hull on fire (they built a replica

    I remember that episode, they couldn't set their replica on fire even when they poured gasoline on it and set that on fire!

    Adam's credibility was busted, not Archimedes'.

    --

    You can't take the sky from me...