Did Archimedes’ “death ray” really work?

Would a moving ship be consumed by flames caused by a heat ray generated by mirrors? Probably not. But could the light reflected by the mirrors seriously disturb the crews? Most likely. Unfortunately, the heat ray, if it existed, did not save Archimedes.

shouted “eureka!” and asked for a support point to move the world. Archimedes of Syracuse He is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

So revered was his wisdom and so celebrated his legacy, that illustrious thinkers who lived almost two millennia after his death in 212 BC exalted him throughout the centuries.

Galileo called it “superhuman“. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz stated that shamed his own genius. Christiaan Huygens said that Archimedes was “incomparable“.

Archimedes was one of the first thinkers to truly look into the mathematics of the material world. It was not enough for him to observe a physical form or process and accept it, I wanted to know numbers and equations that supported its form and function.

Archimedes discovered geometric theorems to determine the area of ​​a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, the area of ​​an ellipse, and the area under a parabola. He also calculated the value of π to the nearest few decimal places.

And these are just some of the countless achievements of the Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer and inventor, notes .

Archimedes also applied his skills to invention. Among the many devices he designed were war machines. Syracuse, his hometown on the island of Sicily in the Mediterranean, was constantly threatened by attacks from the Romans.

When sixty roman ships under the command of Marcus Claudius Marcellus laid siege to the city in 214 BC, Archimedes used innovative catapultsa gigantic “claw” attached to the walls to grab ships and overturn them, and a “heat ray”which modern writers have dubbed, with some dramatism, as “death ray”.

Engineers generally acknowledge that catapults and Archimedes’ claw actually existed, but they prove to be less secure in terms of their “heat radius”.

Ancient writers, who lived centuries after the actual events of the siege, describe huge mirrors that reflected and concentrated sunlight on Roman ships, ending up setting them on fire.

This type of “death ray” works with a magnifying glass and a sheet of paper, but there would have been Archimedes managed to apply it on a much larger scale?

Several scientists have carried out experiments to test this ancient weapon, and even Brenden Senera 12-year-old from Ontario, Canada, the long-running historical debate surrounding Archimedes’ legendary “Death Ray.”

In the 1970s, a Greek scientist, Ioannis Sakkaslined up around 60 Greek sailors with mirrors in their hands and had them redirect sunlight to a focal point on a wooden ship about 50 meters away.

The ship will have caught fire in a short timeleading Sakkas to praise Archimedes’ military genius.

Thirty years later, scientists at MIT used 127 mirrors to set fire successfully created a model of a Roman ship on the university campus. The prospects seemed auspicious to Archimedes!

However, in 2010, a team of engineers from MIT joined the program to test the legend in real conditions. 300 bronze mirrors they were laid out along the San Francisco harbor and pointed at a replica of a Roman warship about 150 feet away. The wooden hull smoked and It burned red hot, but there were no flames..

They repeated the experiment at about 23 meters. It broke out a small firebut it quickly became extinct. The experimenters concluded that Archimedes’ heat ray was possible, but impractical.

Would it be a moving ship consumed by flames? Probably not. But could the light reflected by the mirrors seriously disturb the crews? Most likely.

Unfortunately, the heat ray, if it existed, did not save Archimedes. The Roman soldiers ended up breaking through the walls of Syracuse and, despite orders from Marcus Claudius Marcellus that Archimedes would not be harmed, one of the invaders killed him during the sack of the city.