They did everything wrong in that video. On of their assertions was that soldiers wouldn’t be able to keep their mirrors properly polished. I don’t know about now, but even 40 years ago, polishing brass was a common punishment detail. I imagine it was moreso in Archimedes’ day, when brass and bronze were the thing to use. Also, there are techniques for using a signaling mirror to hit a specific location which aren’t that complicated, would certainly be something that Archimedes could figure out, and would work better for aligning the mirrors than “try really hard to aim at that spot.” The ridiculous assumptions they make besides those also detract from the goal of a best effort to test the heat ray, and seem to stem from the idea that people back then were stupider than we are rather than just not having accumulated as much knowledge as we had.
It was entertaining, but not as informative as I would have liked.
My bad, I forgot there were two episodes on this, I think maybe you only saw the first one or parts of it. There was a huge wooden structure with hundreds of mirrors arranged in a concave shape that almost perfectly aligned all mirrors’ reflections into one spot and absolutely nothing happened. Even with perfect mirrors and modern construction tools and techniques we couldn’t recreate it.
Ah, that could be. Probably due to responses to their first one where they had a bunch of college students holding little mirrors and trying to aim them, and I’ve never watched Mythbusters regularly.
To be fair, they did build a customised rig to aim, using real mirrors to simulate a perfect case scenario, and still failed. While they did mention those issues, they did try to replicate the results pretty faithfully IMO.
They did everything wrong in that video. On of their assertions was that soldiers wouldn’t be able to keep their mirrors properly polished. I don’t know about now, but even 40 years ago, polishing brass was a common punishment detail. I imagine it was moreso in Archimedes’ day, when brass and bronze were the thing to use. Also, there are techniques for using a signaling mirror to hit a specific location which aren’t that complicated, would certainly be something that Archimedes could figure out, and would work better for aligning the mirrors than “try really hard to aim at that spot.” The ridiculous assumptions they make besides those also detract from the goal of a best effort to test the heat ray, and seem to stem from the idea that people back then were stupider than we are rather than just not having accumulated as much knowledge as we had.
It was entertaining, but not as informative as I would have liked.
My bad, I forgot there were two episodes on this, I think maybe you only saw the first one or parts of it. There was a huge wooden structure with hundreds of mirrors arranged in a concave shape that almost perfectly aligned all mirrors’ reflections into one spot and absolutely nothing happened. Even with perfect mirrors and modern construction tools and techniques we couldn’t recreate it.
Ah, that could be. Probably due to responses to their first one where they had a bunch of college students holding little mirrors and trying to aim them, and I’ve never watched Mythbusters regularly.
To be fair, they did build a customised rig to aim, using real mirrors to simulate a perfect case scenario, and still failed. While they did mention those issues, they did try to replicate the results pretty faithfully IMO.