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19-Year-Old Makes Homemade Solar Death Ray
An anonymous reader writes "Concentrated solar power has the potential to generate immense amounts of energy — but it can also be amazingly destructive. American student Eric Jacqmain has assembled over 5,800 mirrors into his own parabolic 'solar Death Ray'."
In the Himalayas, parabolic mirrors around this size are commonly used to boil kettles of water for tea/cooking.
It works at those altitudes, because the sunlight is more intense (less having been absorbed by the atmosphere), and because water boils at a lower temperature at the lower atmospheric pressure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker#Solar_kettles
That's how I ended up with a Zune... :(
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Stirling Energy System's SunCatcher uses this system to drive a stirling engine mounted on a parabolic mirror. It always seemed like a better, simpler solution than photovoltaic cells to me.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Often they "Bust" something that they consider to be highly implausible or statistically unlikely even if there have been one or two cases of it actually happening. The show is focused upon "can this happen under normal or slightly abnormal circumstances" more than "if the right set of circumstances happen at the right time and everything goes as wrong as possible..."
But concerning the solar "death" ray, the real issue was that while you can easily make one out of modern materials, they didn't have modern mirrors or modern optics 2000 years ago. They've taken this into account.
Besides, where are you going to get to see a canon made out of duct tape?