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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.""
...if they had properly powered it with cold nuclear fission.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Looks like getting someone's pants on fire was not the pastime in Archimedes's day.
The height of conceit: having an orgasm and calling out your own name.
Why are they trying to burn the wood, when it seems like the rigging should be easier to torch and just as debilitating?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Having failed to do the experiments once and declare the thing as "most likely a myth"! Even today, many, if not most, of the experiments are non-replicable. Well, for most cases they are probably myths or hoaxes, but some of them are genuinely very hard to replicate. The reason can range from precision requirements to hazy details. The latter is the usual suspect, which, I believe, applies in this case as well.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
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 wonder if Roman ships may have been innately more flammable than that 80 year old boat. The use of tar or pitch to seal rough-hewn planks on the sides of the Roman ships would have made them more susceptible to fire. Any oiled cloth would also have made these ancient boats more flammable.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"I couldn't do it, therefore it cannot be done"? These guys need to go back to logic 101.
"Hyneman has a degree in Russian language and literature. He has had a variety of careers, including scuba diver, wilderness survival expert, boat captain, linguist, pet shop owner, animal wrangler, machinist and chef."
"Adam Savage: Before becoming a TV host, he spent 10 years as an artisan in special effects, specifically modelmaking for companies such as Industrial Light and Magic, Warner Bros. and Disney. He worked on such films as Star Wars Episodes I and II, The Matrix sequels, Bicentennial Man, A.I., Space Cowboys, and others.
He has also been an animator, graphic designer, carpenter, set designer, toy designer, rigger, and has many sculptures on display in museums across the country."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Savage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Hyneman
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.
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.
Remember that 7-Up commercial from a couple'a years back? The one that features a 7-Up machine on treads that rolled around and fired cans of soda at people?
Jamie built that.
His company, M5 Industries Inc., specializes in robotic designs for visual effects. He's got a lot of experience building, you know, robots. He's designed or been involved in designing things that are required to do a huge variety of bizarre and wacky things - from the aforementioned surly soda-firing vending machine robot to a motorized shoe-cycle to a articulated giant hand (as seen in the film Monkeybone).
And, to remind those of you who watched Battlebots when it was on:
He built Blendo.
So, yes, he's got engineering experience. He's got a lot of engineering experience. And, yes, special and visual effects work *does* require a lot of skill and talent - and the ability to judge whether something is practicable in the field.
(I'd also recommend that you look at the career of one James "The Amazing" Randi before commenting further. Take an especially close look at how often people claim that a stage magician shouldn't be trying to debunk so-called "real" paranormal events.)
Click here!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
If you bothered to read the FAQ, you would see that he agrees with the MythBusters conclusion. The mirrors need to be aligned VERY precisely AND the device needs to be within A FEW FEET of the object to be destroyed. Yes, the device works, but it is not a ship destroyer.
Although the LEGO pirate ship managed to last just 16 minutes...
Early Roman navys were often temporary entities although there were also permanent squadrons even during the later empire. By then it seems their main function was to combat pirates and smugglers since the Romans had by then eliminated all serious naval challengers. A large standing navy only reappeared during the very late imperial and Byzantine period when various barbarian and large moslem naval forces reappered as the Western and then the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed. The temporary fleets, built on campaign or to deal with some sudden maratime threat, were often built of unseasoned or low quality wood and intended to last no more than a few of campaigning seasons before they were either scrapped as unseaworthty or had been lost to bad weather. While it is probably possible to torch a Roman war galley at ancor on a calm cloudless day using some sort of mirror array I don't think such a weapon would have scored more than a couple of sucesses at best and it would have been practically useless against a fast moving and maneuvering target. It would have been most useful against relatively immobile targets such as floating siege towers or catapults that would have been mounted on platforms made by lashing several galleys together. If anything the psychological effect of this 'death ray' would have been far greater than the practical destructive effect, sort of like the effect that rockets had the first time Chinese armies deployed them in combat. At first they probably scared the hell out of the barbarians but after a short while barbarians got wise to the fact that unless they were really big and carried exploding warheads Chinese rockets were not terribly destructive and made sure their forces knew it and that the horses were acclimatized to the alien noises the rockets made. I would not expect a force that achieved the very high degree of professionalism the Roman army did to have been impressed by this sort of a weapon for very long even if the weapon worked under ideal conditions.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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
Hi.... It's my first post here..... I really like this site! Now.... The other thing to remember is that at the time of Archimedes, good quality glass was not discovered yet - most mirrors at the time were made from malachite. Such a mirror would not have reflected nearly the amount of light that a modern glass mirror would have done. Good quality glass did not come into Rome until about 250 years after Archimedes. I actually looked into this pretty carefully for my book "The Light of Alexandria" - http://www.lightofalexandria.com/ . Some of the other inventions that Archimedes made for the defense of Syracuse were pretty amazing, though........ JM
Screw the sails.. real triremes would have been covered in hemp rope. And from the experiments I performed in college, I can attest that hemp burns very well!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Yul Brynner did that trick in Solomon and Sheba (1959), having his troops polish their shields before an expected sunrise attack. The enemy weren't blinded, just dazzled, but he had positioned his men behind a convenient chasm...
rj
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."
This is why you don't put your faith in freshmen (or 1/3 of the stuff in medical journals, but that's a separate issue).
Fair enough but the MIT team did achieve ignition using fixed mirror placements and just 127 flat 1 square foot mirrors.
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.
So, the only real constraint is providing a means of manually aiming the mirror properly. I'm not an optics expert...but if there's a way to design a sighting device, perhaps like a sextant, then the myth of 3000 soldiers with 5'-square bronze shields incinerating a ship could easily be true.
(1 square foot)X127=127(MIT achieved ignition with this, roughly 1100 F)
vs.
(5 square feet)X3000=15,000(Grecian army w/ bronze shields)
That's a massive magnification factor of about 120X. 120X the ignition luminance(cd/m2) could vaporize the target instead of igniting it.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
When completed in 1978, the National Solar Thermal Test Facility cost just over $21 million. The NSTTF is an array of 222 focusable mirrors, or heliostats, covering 8 acres (7 football fields), located on the grounds of Sandia National Laboratory at the edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The mirrors (facets) are focused onto a receiver or target mounted on a tower. The NSTTF tower is 200 feet tall, and its 8-foot-thick foundation is 50 feet below ground. The mirrors can direct up to 5 megawatts of solar radiation onto the receiver or other experimental objects. An uncooled object placed in the beam can be quickly raised to temperatures of over 4000 degrees F.
The mirrors are mounted on individual frames that are tipped up and down and rotated east to west by small motors much like those used in electric clocks. The motors are controlled by a computer which determines how to position each heliostat so that its reflection hits the receiver at any time of the day and any day of the year. The mirrors are made of two layers of glass with reflective silver between the glass layers. The quality of the glass is like that in your windows at home. The silver in one heliostat (25 mirrors-in one frame) weighs only about 1 ounce. Rain, snow, and other natural forms of moisture actually help keep the mirrors clean by washing away accumulated dust. Hail and dust storms have not harmed the mirrors. Only hail over 1 inch in diameter is likely to break the mirrors.
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!"