Archimedes Death Ray

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."

Comments

Re:Mythbusters

[Shamashmuddamiq]

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.

Re:Fire good!

[jericho4.0]

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.

Does anyone else find myth busters annoying?

[TummyX]

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.