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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'."
This is what a science education lets you do. Stay in school kids!
Move sig!
More specifically, there are two issues with your suggestion. Firstly, lasers are not power-limited by input light, but rather by the design of the lasing cavity and how efficiently it stimulates further emission. Many types do need a decent kick to get them going, but beyond that a bright source offers little or no benefit.
Secondly, even if more input light was useful, this mirror doesn't actually provide that much power. It's just the use of the parabolic reflector to concentrate the energy into a small energy that makes it look impressive. Looking at the dish, it's a few square metres in area, at most. That's only a few kW of light in total, of which only a tiny portion is at any one wavelength which would be useful for pumping a laser. An appropriate pump laser or even a decent flashlamp would be vastly better than this for stimulating laser emission.
Also, LASER. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
The tiny mirror pieces are from a mirror ball. Yes, I actually do go out sometimes.
What, you mean the victim is a vegan and you've invited him to a BBQ?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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 depends a lot on how fast the vehicle is moving.
Is that an African or a European vehicle?
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
You're retarded, small focused flat mirrors are more efficient and less prone to scatter than a non perfect parabolic shape. Not to mention the reflectivity of actual mirror is far superior to any sprays or sheeting you could cheaply purchase. There is a reason the cells of production solar plants use flat mirrors that they combine to form a parrabolic array.
What if you taunted the enemy first?
I have the simple solution to that question: a girl said she thought it would be cool.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Yeah, I used to burn ants with a magnifying glass too when I was much younger than 19. Solar death rays are pretty common at that age.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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
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?
I had to follow up with an example that shows their stupidity.
Bimp burns.
Bimp with hydrogen burns fast.
Bimp with thermite burns slower than just hydrogen but still burns considerably faster than simple material.
Bimp burns super faster with hydrogen + thermite, which accurately reproduces historic tragedy. The conclusion of intelligent people is hardly surprising; accelerent do exactly that and thermite clearly works as an accelerent with hydrogen (likely the extra O being provided).Their conclusion - busted. WTF!?!?! But if you ignore their stupidity which is their "conclusion", the reality is, they absolutely "confirmed" the myth, which was thermite (their coating) played a significant role in the speed of destruction. Its literally impossible to view the material with any other conclusion and yet they believe they busted it. Seemingly, they came to a conclusion which isn't even remotely supported by the available material or their tests. WTF?!?