Slashdot Mirror
Archimedes Death Ray in San Francisco
Monkey-Man2000 writes "Following the recent demonstration by MIT students that Archimedes' death ray could have been used to burn Roman ships, the producers of the Discovery Channel's Myth Busters invited the MIT team to San Francisco to try their death ray on an 80-year old fishing boat. This time, even with perfect weather, they were unable to set the boat afire. From the article, "Peter Rees, executive producer of "Myth Busters," said the experiment at the Hunters Point Shipyard showed that Archimedes' death ray was most likely a myth.""
I take it as a sign that if Syracuse had the entire MIT instead of one Archimedes, we would not be hearing the story at all. Go Greeks.
So... it sometimes works, but is generally not reliable enough for anyone to bother reusing it. The Greeks lost that battle, too -- if the death ray worked well, they could have just burned everything (at least until the evening came).
The story sounds plausible. Archimedes invented something that managed to set one or two ships on fire (and most likely the fire was extinguished in no time), but was unable to have any strategic meaning.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
"I couldn't do it, therefore it cannot be done"? These guys need to go back to logic 101.
I think most people with any kind of scientific background that watch Mythbusters realize that all they are really proving is that the particular way of doing things that they chose does not work. They rarely if ever prove something is impossible, but they have proven many things to be possible. Given the perfect set of conditions, a lot of things that they say are myths could probably actually have occurred.
What?
As others have mentioned, we don't know what the Roman boats were exactly made of. Was it pine? Balsa? And the tar/pitch used to seal them is very flammable.
The time of day is important; the amount of solar energy hitting the mirrors is highest at noon.
They could have lit the sails, which is good enough when you're trying to set fire to a wooden boat.
Modern boats have paint and all sorts of other goodness on them, which is reflective.
This boat that they tried this experiment on was 80 years old. What does years of sitting in water do to the wood, in terms of flammability? We don't know. How old were the ships that Archimedes set on fire? We don't know.
Now we know that SQ of distance effects the power
No, dissipation of light in air is negligible on such distances, so the power itself is roughly constant. The effect of distance is all in targetting inaccuracies -- having a number of soldiers pinpoint a distant object exactly is not really feasible.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Freshmen from MIT used some scrawny wood not representative of the thickness of an actual vessel of that age. Thinner wood burns more readily, eh? The myth doesn't mave much more math to it than a good highschool education would impart. Are you pissed because your tuition is so expensive?
Blar.
The anti-personnel aspects of the Archimedes Heatray were probably more important.
Imagine being a rower and this intolerable heat builds up on your back.
Or a steersman or bowman? Sighting in the glare?
Burning the rigging would be a plus, but disabling the enemy crew would be better. In fact it would be the equivalent of a neutron bomb, leaving the boats to be used by the Greeks at a later date whilst killing off the enemy!
There's more than one way to skin a cat!
Spreading rumours about Archimede's marvelous machines must have been a pretty good deterrent to invasion.
We cannot build something that compares to the size and accuracy of the pyramids in Egypt, using only the materials and tools they had available at the time. Although we know for a fact they managed it somehow.
Just because we can't replicate it, doesn't mean it can't be done.
C17H21NO4
In those times, it must have been something quite scary.
Let's see, you're on a boat, going into battle. Everybody's naturally quite nervous already. And suddenly there's this really awful light that sets fire the sail, sets somebody's hair on fire, burns another one's face, blinds several people... The Greeks would probably not get it perfectly right on the first try, but could in the process manage to freak everybody out even before getting any practical results.
I bet that even without burning anything you could cause enough confusion with just blinding and burning people to make everybody on the boat think that the sky is falling. Nobody would want to dare look towards the light, so it could make things quite complicated.
Unlikely - setting ships on fire was an obvious and common strategy back then, so boats would have to have been at least somewhat fireproofed. If they were really floating fire hazards, they wouldn't have lasted long.
Ahh... but maybe setting ships on fire was such a common, effective strategy because the ships were so flammable?
Why are they trying to burn the wood, when it seems like the rigging should be easier to torch and just as debilitating?
Gives new meaning to the phrase "rigged test", eh?
As the other link hints of, generally battle ships of those days depended on manual rowing far more than sails during battle because sails were not that fast back then.
But an alternative explanation is the Archimedes' techniques could have been used to blind and confuse the occupants during battle. Not nearly as dramatic, but still possibly a way to get an edge. The myth of torching could have grown out of that.
Table-ized A.I.
After attempting and failing to reconstruct the pyramid of Cheops, experimenters conclude that "the fabled Pyramids of Egypt are likely just a myth, there's no way they could have built such a huge pile of stone slabs when we with our mighty technologies cannot do so today."
The Romans used quadriremes at Syracuse. They were at anchor for quite some time, as it was a blockade/siege, rather than merely a naval battle. Most likely the attack with the "death ray" would have taken place well after the start of the siege. My question is why the "death ray" couldn't have been aimed at the stowed sails - I don't think the sails would have been put belowdecks (but I don't know much about Roman naval technology: the best source would no doubt be Lionel Casson's book Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World ISBN 0801851300 ) - I haven't read it, but Casson's very good on travel in the ancient world, and he knows his ancient ships. On Syracuse itself, I imagine there's stuff in Polybius, but from what I remember, the "death ray" story is late (Plutarch, maybe? Maybe even later?) and we don't know for sure if there's a reliable source lying behind the story. Regardless, Archimedes did engineer various kinds of engines that were used in the siege (cranes, etc.).
Why should anyone study history? Indulge their curiousity? I mean we know everything, right?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Perhaps they should call themselves the "Mythtesters", rather than the "Mythbusters". The process they use does not lend itself to definite conclusions. They merely test the plausibility of such myths. As such, I don't think they should make the claim that they "bust" the myths.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Unless they happen to have an authentic ship of the type used in the siege ... which is impossible, given those ships will have rotted away many centuries ago. Perhaps you meant, "Unless they happen to build an authentic replica..."
Then again, even a replica won't satisfy some folks, so there's no way to 100% prove or disprove the concept.
Then again, even a replica won't satisfy some folks, so there's no way to 100% prove or disprove the concept.
Correct. Although a replica created by historians and naval engineers working together would carry a lot more weight than an old fishing boat.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Atleast they do use some science, and do apply reason in most, if not all myths they deal with.
Anyway, they just create a TV show, and I find their scientific curiousity and readiness to try out things appealing. and that they are not full of any deep religeous/mythological sh**.
Experience in building stuff and making things work take them high above most couch scientists and technoblabbers anyway.
Such as? I think Mythbusters is one of the best science-related programs on tv today. No not because all of the shows are done with an exacting precision and logical rigorousness reminiscent of the Cavendish lab, but rather because it shows the core of the scientific method IN ACTION. They have an idea that needs testing, they make a guess at what might happen if they try X, they build an experiment to actually try X, then they run the experiment and draw some conclutions from the results. I can not recall a more apt application of the Baconian method ever being shown on any TV show (save for perhaps Bill Nye or Mr. Wizard or something). Who cares if thier guesses about how precisely the experiment should be set up are wrong, that's (a HUGE) part of science! At the end of the show they usually even discuss where thier experiments could've gone wrong or what might be done better if they tried it again. What more could you ask for in a tv show?! I think it is an especially excellent show for kids to watch. Numerous scientific principals are explained in an accessable and interesting manner (bouyancy, properties of heat and light, mechanical levers and mech. advantage, electrical circuts, flamability of vapours vs. liquids, properties of density, inertia, and on and on). The show can do a great job of keeping them simultaneously entertained with the odd explosion but also teaching the rigorous and logical thought processes necessary for the foundation of a scientific mindset. I really can't say enough good about it.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
The MythBusters *frequently* come into experiments with preconceptions. Have you ever watched the show?
Furthermore, I suspect you miss the point. The point is that people often don't understand the appropriate skill-set required to test particular claims. In Randi's case, because a significant portion of what he's been asked to test involves fraud and trickery (Uri Geller's amazing spoon-bending sleight-of-hand, Peter Popoff's Holy Radio Transmitter, the kids who can change the color of a match in a matchbox, but only if you turn your back and don't tape the matchbox shut) the skill-set of a stage magician applies. In the MythBusters' case, much of what they're asked to do involves recreating (or creating) particular oddball scenarios in front of a camera, and, since the profession of practical visual effects artist can best be described as "recreating or creating particular oddball scenarios in front of a camera," that skill-set applies.
In other words, you don't need to be an optical engineer with eighteen patents and tenure at MIT to be able to point a lot of mirrors at something. You do have to, however, be able to point a lot of mirrors at something.
Randi doesn't even pretend to be unbiased.
Why should he be? No one has ever managed to offer up a single shred of empirical evidence that magical powers are real. Oh, excuse me: the vogue 21st century term is "psychic", I guess so you don't sound so much like a stupid twat when you claim that magic is real and that you can, indeed, cast spells.
There's no reason to treat magic as a heretofore unexplored branch of science since no one, anywhere, has ever managed to do anything magic as evidence that the paranormal exists. People who claim to have these powers are either fooling themselves, fooling other people, or doing both.
Given the complete and utter lack of this evidence, Randi's approach is perfectly reasonable. Especially since Randi has a perfect, 100% track record of debunking this crap as what it is: delusion and con artistry.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Actually no, it is not 120x it is more like 24x. You'r 5ft square shield would produce a "bright spot" that is 5ft square, not 1ft square, so you would actually have 3000 spots that cover 5ft square (assuming the shield is almost perfectly flat). So your magnification actually becomes 3000/127 = ~24
Every shield I have ever seen is actually convex in shape, which would actually disperse the light being reflected. Granted, you could reverse the shield to make it concave, which would concentrate the light. However this would make the range at which the light could be concentrated in any significant amount very limited - so if you wanted to burn a ship, it would have to be at within a specific range to achieve any sort of concentration.
Add this statement of yours:
The 'freshmen' failed because there was no visual reference point for aiming. When 100 other 'bright spots' are aiming at the same target you, there is no way of telling which bright spot is yours so it's impossible to make the proper adjustments to focus your beam onto the target.
Plus the fact that even the best polished bronze would be less efficient than a modern mirror, and the death ray probably just made the Romans see alot of pink dots for a while (or gave them a good tan).
If there's any truth to the story, then what probably happened was they all lined up their shield, blinding the crew, and some archers got a couple of good shots in with flaming arrows.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
Grant Imahara has a background in electrical engineering. I believe he is the only one with an engineering background. Most of the members of the show worked on Hollywood blockbusters and approach busting the myth, not in purely scientific method, but something close to it. Something like what you would do in middle school. Which is why the show is popular among non technical people as well as the techinial people.
The Mit people saw the original show and tried to do it their way. That is why Mythbusters people invited them to San Francisco, to show the differences between the Mit people and the Mythbusters. It's not critiquing, Mythbusters unlike any TV show I know respond to criticisms to their techniques and follow up on them, and I think that's a good thing.
It does decrease with the square of the distance from the source, but the source is the sun, not the mirror. Adding a few hundred feet to that distance will do very little change, even when squared.