Complex Numbers

What's the Opposite of Eureka?

Now, here's a kid who's going to be subject to government scrutiny for the next few years.

    13-year-old has eureka moment with science project that suggests Archimedes’ invention was plausible  

After which they'll probably recruit him.

Often called the father of mathematics, Archimedes was one of the most famous inventors in ancient Greece, with some of his ideas and principles still in use today.

While there is no doubt that Archimedes made important contributions to mathematics, calling him "the father of mathematics" is rather insulting to earlier mathematicians, not to mention horrifically Eurocentric.

But one fabled device has left scientists speculating on its existence for hundreds of years — the death ray. Now, a middle schooler may have some answers.

Hey, when I was that age, I was fascinated by death rays, too. But this was a simpler time, and as far as I know, I wasn't subject to government surveillance for my hobbies.

Brenden Sener, 13, of London, Ontario, has won two gold medals and a London Public Library award for his minuscule version of the contraption — a supposed war weapon made up of a large array of mirrors designed to focus and aim sunlight on a target, such as a ship, and cause combustion — according to a paper published in the January issue of the Canadian Science Fair Journal.

Also, calling it a "death ray" is probably sensationalism. Most sources I've seen use "heat ray," but I think even that is misleading. Regardless; the point is, people have argued over whether Archie could have actually constructed the weapon using Greek technology of the time, or if perhaps it was speculation (similar to da Vinci's later speculation about flying machines or whatever). Hell, René Descartes dismissed the idea.

There is no archaeological evidence that the contraption existed, as Sener noted in his paper, but many have tried to recreate the mechanism to see if the ancient invention could be feasible.

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, of course. Oh, and no one, as far as I know, is saying the idea is unworkable; only that it might not have been feasible using tech available in the 3rd century BCE.

At the same time, evidence that it could have been built and used isn't the same thing as evidence that it was built and used.

The article describes his setup, and then:

Writing in the paper, Sener said he found these results to be “quite remarkable as it suggests that light is going in all directions and that the shape of the concave mirror focuses the light waves onto a single point.”

Well... that's a bit disappointing. Was CNN clickbaiting us with that headline? While this is certainly what I'd call a good middle school science fair project, it's not like we didn't already know that focusing light rays intensifies the resulting temperature. Hell, all this is, is the reflection version of using a magnifying glass to burn ants.

While the experiment doesn’t offer “anything significantly new to the scientific literature … his findings were a nice confirmation of the first law of thermodynamics,” which states energy or heat can be transferred, Ho said.

Blink. Blink.

Look, I'm not trying to diminish the kid's accomplishment. Hell, I couldn't ever come up with an idea for a science project at that age. It's not that I wasn't interested; it's that I wasn't creative enough. Still not. But it proves nothing about Archie's heat ray.