Index – Tech-Science – A 12-year-old boy built Archimedes’ “death ray”

In one of our previous articles, we wrote about how, according to a medieval legend, the ancient Greek inventor could also experiment with the creation of a mirror weapon system that could be used to focus the sun’s rays and set fire to the ships of an enemy fleet. What’s more, according to legend, it was this weapon that supposedly set fire to the ships of the Romans during the siege of Syracuse.

Historians have not yet been able to prove whether there could be any basis for this legend (the uncertainty is mainly caused by the fact that the weapon is only written about in medieval accounts, there is no trace of it in the surviving works of Archimedes). However, a 12-year-old high school student from Canada, Brenden Sener, decided to test whether this device could really work.

According to the Interesting Engineering portal, the teenager originally created the miniature version of the imagined Archimedean death ray for a Canadian science exhibition.

The Canadian teenager carried out the experiment in an indoor environment at a temperature of 21 degrees, for which he used various devices (including an infrared thermometer, plastic fasteners, a heating lamp, concave mirrors and a piece of cardboard as a target, which he set up in a designated area).

First, he set up a 50-watt heat lamp on a table and pointed it at the target for three minutes, taking its temperature three times during that time. He then placed four concave mirrors to focus on the target area. He tested each mirror separately and then in combination.

He then repeated this process with a larger, 100-watt heating lamp to see how much stronger the effect was.

The results showed that using mirrors to focus the light increased the target temperature more than amplifying the light source itself. The more mirrors he added to the experiment, the hotter the target object became. Although the light spread in all directions, the concave mirror concentrated it at one point.

In conclusion, these series of experiments have shown that the theory behind the Archimedean death ray works, and therefore I accept my original hypothesis that concave mirrors can be used to reflect and concentrate light emitted from a light source

– wrote Brendan Sener, who also published a study on this in the journal of the aforementioned Canadian science exhibition.

As he wrote, if large concave mirrors were available in sufficient quantities and set up in the right way, at an angle, it would indeed be possible to set fire to an object in this way. At the same time, the teenager noted that the technology probably wouldn’t have worked in cold or cloudy weather.

Finally, he came to the conclusion that although the historical description of the use of the death ray in ancient Syracuse is “believable” in the scientific sense, archaeological findings still do not prove that the device existed.

According to IFL Science, Brendan Sener even received awards abroad for the scientific experiment. He won the gold medals of the Matthews Hall Annual Science Fair and the Physical Sciences Thames Valley Science and Engineering Fair, and also received the London City Library’s science award for children.

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