Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 16:24:27 EDT
From: SHnSASSY1@aol.com
To: SHnSASSY1@aol.com
Subject: [SO] *Archimedes' Secret Death Ray Is Brought to Light 

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http://www.foxnews.com/science/052200/times_archimedes.sml
*Archimedes' Secret Death Ray Is Brought to Light 
By Jonathan Leake    
For the Romans it looked like their easiest battle. They came to invade 
Syracuse â^À^Ô and found soldiers with mirrors. 
As their boats approached the coast of Sicily the sun came out, a light beam 
leapt from the shore and their boats burst into flames. They had become 
victims of the first "death ray". 

For centuries archaeologists have argued over descriptions of how Archimedes, 
antiquity's greatest inventor, used concentrated solar energy to destroy the 
Roman fleet in 212BC. 

Historians have said nobody then knew enough about optics and mirrors. This 
month, however, a study will show that some ancient civilizations, including 
that of Archimedes, had optical sciences so advanced that they may even have 
made telescopes â^À^Ô an invention attributed to the 16th-century astronomer 
Galileo â^À^Ô and that "burning mirrors" would have been within their reach. 

Robert Temple, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at 
Louisville University, Kentucky, said his research suggested Archimedes's 
success meant he was the father of modern laser weapons such as guided bombs 
and missiles. 

Archimedes was born around 280BC and was famed for his mathematical skills 
and his ability to use them for building war machines. These included 
catapults that hurled boulders at the enemy, long chutes that could be 
projected from the city walls for rocks to be rolled down, and cranes with 
grappling hooks that could lift ships and shake the sailors into the water. 

Archimedes is best known for running through Syracuse naked shouting "Eureka" 
after realizing, while in the bath, that he could work out the purity of gold 
by measuring the volume of water it displaced. For his fellow citizens, 
however, that would have been trivial compared with a death ray for 
incinerating the dreaded Romans. 

Temple has retranslated ancient texts detailing the optical skills of ancient 
civilizations. In The Crystal Sun, published this month, he gives new 
descriptions of how Archimedes used mirrors on the Romans. 

The oldest of those texts, by a historian named Lucian and a medical writer 
called Galen, are from the 2nd century AD, more than 300 years after the 
siege, but references in them show they are drawing on works written soon 
after it. 

Temple believes these scholars had read the now lost works of Polybius, a 
Greek historian and contemporary of Archimedes, whose surviving descriptions 
of Rome's rise to world dominance are among the most respected of their time. 

For Temple the clinching evidence comes from experiments recreating 
Archimedes's feat. The first was in 6th-century Constantinople when the 
Byzantine capital was besieged by enemy ships â^À^Ô until it employed dozens of 
men holding mirrors to set fire to them. 

Modern scientists have recreated such events under controlled conditions. In 
1973 a Greek scientist, Ioannis Sakas, decided to see whether "burning 
mirrors" could set fire to a boat. He lined up 60 sailors on a quay with 
large mirrors, from which they reflected light onto a small boat 150ft away. 
The boat was in flames within three minutes. 

Paul Ewart, an Oxford University professor of physics and a specialist in 
optics, said Archimedes would have been unable to make his mirrors flat 
enough with the available technology. 

However, curators at the British Museum recently relabeled a glass fragment 
excavated from the ancient Assyrian city of Kalhu after realizing that what 
they had considered to be a bauble was likely to be a finely ground lens for 
correcting short sight. It was made around 800BC, about 600 years before 
Archimedes was born. 

â^À^Ô Additional reporting by Michelle Fleming 



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