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Often called the father of mathematics, Archimedes was one of the most famous inventors in ancient Greece, and some of his ideas and principles are still used today.
But one legendary device has had scientists speculating about its existence for hundreds of years: the death ray. Now a high school student might have some answers.
Brenden Sener, 13, from London, Ontario, has won two gold medals and a London Public Library award for his tiny version of the device – an alleged weapon of war consisting of a large number of mirrors designed to focus sunlight on a target and to aim. , like a ship, and cause combustion – according to an article published in the January issue of the Canadian Science Fair Journal.
The Greek polymath has fascinated Sener since he heard about the inventor during a family vacation to Greece. For his 2022 science project, Sener recreated the Archimedes screw, a device for raising and moving water. But he didn’t stop there.
Sener found the death ray one of the most intriguing devices, also called the heat ray. Historical writings suggested that Archimedes used ‘burning mirrors’ to set fire to anchored ships during the siege of Syracuse from 214 to 212 BC.
“Archimedes was so far ahead of his time with his inventions. And it really revolutionized technology at the time, because Archimedes thought of things that no one had before,” Sener said. “(The death ray) is such a fun idea that no one would have thought of at the time.”
There is no archaeological evidence that the device existed, as Sener noted in his article, but many have tried to recreate the mechanism to see if the ancient invention could be feasible.
Miniature death ray
In Sener’s attempt at beam, he placed a heating lamp opposite four small concave mirrors, each tilted to direct the light onto a piece of cardboard with an X marked at its focal point. In this project he designed for the 2023 Matthews Hall Annual Science Fair, Sener hypothesized that as the mirrors focused light energy on the cardboard, the temperature of the target would increase with each added mirror.
In his experiment, Sener conducted three tests with two different light bulb powers, 50 watts and 100 watts. Each additional mirror increased the temperature significantly, he discovered.
“I wasn’t sure how the results would come out because there were a lot of different results with this topic, but I did expect the heat to increase – but not as drastically as I discovered when I actually did my experiment. ”, said Sener.
The temperature of the cardboard with just the heating lamp and the 100 watt light bulb and no mirrors was approximately 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27.2 degrees Celsius). After waiting for the cardboard to cool, Sener added a mirror and tested again. The temperature of the focal point rose to almost 34.9 degrees Celsius, he found.
The largest increase occurred with the addition of the fourth mirror. The temperature with three mirrors pointed at the target was almost 110°F (43.4°C), but the addition of a fourth mirror increased the temperature by about 18°F (10°C) to 128°F (53.5°C).
Sener wrote in the paper that he found these results “quite remarkable, because it suggests that light travels in all directions and that the shape of the concave mirror concentrates the light waves at a single point.”
Cliff Ho, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, praised Sener for his insights into Archimedes’ death ray and said the project is “an excellent evaluation of the fundamental processes.” The facility is a U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration engineering and scientific laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Although the experiment “doesn’t offer anything significantly new to the scientific literature… its findings were a nice confirmation of the first law of thermodynamics,” which states that energy or heat can be transferred, Ho said. The scientist had proposed a conference on the death ray in 2014 and concluded that the idea was possible but would have been difficult for Archimedes to realize.
Sener didn’t try to set anything on fire because “a heating lamp doesn’t generate nearly enough heat as the sun,” he said. But he believes that using solar rays and a larger mirror would “raise the temperature even more drastically and faster” and “easily cause combustion.”
More theories about the death ray
Every two years, the Olympic torch is set ablaze using a curved parabolic mirror that concentrates sunlight into one point. Once the torch is placed in that focal point, the sun’s rays ignite the torch. It is not generally believed that Archimedes used a single parabolic mirror because it cannot be oriented in the same way as a plane mirror.
It is more commonly speculated that Archimedes’ death ray was a series of several mirrors or polished shields. However, this theory is often discredited due to the idea that ships would be in motion during battle. For the ships to be ignited by the heat generated by the mirrors, they would have had to be stationary and anchored near the coast, said Thomas Chondros, a retired associate professor at the department of mechanical engineering and aeronautics at the Greek University from Patras. Chondros studied Archimedes and his inventions.
The Discovery Channel series “MythBusters” included episodes from 2004, 2006 and 2010 that tested scenarios for the supposed death ray, but the legend was ultimately declared a myth when a wooden boat failed to catch fire in every test. In 2005, a class of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, inspired by the show’s first episode, were once able to set fire to a wooden boat using a technique similar to Sener’s on a larger scale, but failed on a second attempt.
Sener said he believes that, by combining MIT’s findings with his own, the data could suggest that the death ray was plausible, and that Archimedes likely could have used the sun’s rays with large mirrors to cause combustion. But the technology may not work in low temperatures or cloudy weather, and the impact of the sea on the movement of ships affects the usability of this device, he added in his article.
Despite the limitations on the death ray’s usefulness, Chondros found Sener’s project “interesting and well documented” and the teen’s experimental setup could “form the basis of a discussion for young students, even university students,” he said in a e-mail. .
Sener’s mother, Melanie, was not surprised by her son’s choice of a science project. “He has always been fascinated by history, by science, by nature. … He always had a thirst for any kind of education and knowledge,” she said.
Sener could one day see himself as a scientist, whether in engineering, bioengineering or medicine, he said.
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