Greek Technology

[Spectral]

Originally Posted by Helgi
They tried to do a Archimedes death ray on some tv show using a brieme as a target, they couldn't get it to work
Yea! Mythbusters!

Actually, it looks like their conclusions weren't as definitive as that...

http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experim...desResult.html

http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/experim...thbusters.html

xv) Did it really happen?
We're not historians and cannot answer this question. Overall, there are a number of special conditions and important details that need to be considered to get the death ray to start a fire. However, given the location of the city, the local conditions, the ease of implementing the idea once one has worked out the sensitivities, and the brilliance of Archimedes, my own opinion is that I personally can't rule it out all together (can't say it happened either). However, our goal was to use Mythbusters to motivate doing a quantitative estimation of feasibility, to demonstrate the possibility using a sketch model experiment, and to have some fun in the process.