Even though Archimedes' soldiers could not have used mirrors to burn the Romans' ships, this myth may have some basis in fact. The focused sunlight at the SunTower is used to boil water, and then the resulting steam is used to turn electrical generators. For example, the Sierra SunTower solar power plant uses 24,000 flat mirrors spread over 20 acres in order to focus sunlight onto two boilers. It takes a very large effective mirror to focus the sunlight to useful intensities. Third, sunlight only carries so much energy, even if perfectly focused. When Marcellus withdrew them his ships a bow-shot, the old man Archimedes constructed a kind of hexagonal mirror, and at an interval proportionate to. 212 BC) was a great mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Secondly, ships are made out of sea-worthy wood which is much harder to light than paper. Metacritic Game Reviews, Archimedes Mirror for iPhone/iPad, Archimedes of Syracuse (Greek c. First, ships that are far enough away to safely assault with sunlight would be too far away to reliably focus the sunlight. It would be impractical for the Greeks to produce, perfectly align, and effectively use 440 mirrors in 214 BC. This short film is suitable for teaching science at Key Stage 2 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Even then, smoldering wood can be extinguished easy with a splash of salt water. Dick and Dom describe the major scientific achievements of Absolute Genius, Archimedes. Clift calculate that 440 flat square meter mirrors would be needed to smolder wood at a distance of 50 meters. As published in the European Journal of Physics under the title ' Reflections on the ‘Burning Mirrors of Archimedes',' the scientists A. While a concave mirror held in one hand can light a paper in the other hand by focusing sunlight, burning a distant wooden ship would require an impractically large mirror. Having set from an equally measured interval of the mirror small such mirrors, fourfold in their corners, that were set in motion both by cups and some hinge joints, he set that six-angled mirror in the middle of rays of the sun when it was midday both in the summer and in. This myth claims that by focusing the sun's rays, Archimedes' mirrors raised the temperature of the ships enough that they caught fire. The old man Archimedes constructed some sort of six-angled mirror. How did Archimedes use mirrors to burn up invaders' ships?Ĭategory: Physics Published: December 11, 2012Īrchimedes did not use mirrors to burn up the Roman invaders' ships.

Archimedes mirror