A 13-year-old built Archimedes’ death ray

Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes theorized that it would be possible to create a death ray using the power of the sun. Now a 13-year-old student in Canada has put the ancient inventor’s idea to the test and proven that Archimedes’ death ray can actually be built.

The student responsible for this achievement is 13-year-old Brenden Sener from London, Ontario. Sener said Popular mechanics that he became fascinated by the concepts of ancient Greece after a family holiday in Greece. Since then, he has developed a working prototype of the concept and even published an article about the death ray in the Canadian Science Fair Journal.

Sener says that while no archaeological evidence of Archimedes’ death ray has ever been found, he believes it may have been used in the way described in the books of ancient philosophers. To see if the concept was plausible, Sener built a system using a heat lamp and several mirrors. He found that each mirror added increased the temperature of the redirected light.

The idea of ​​the much broader concept is that the ancient Greeks used the death ray to protect their homes from invading Roman ships, such as in the Battle of Syracuse from 214 to 212 BC. These ancient death rays may have contained massive mirrors, or they may have used highly polished shields that redirected the light and energy of the sun towards their targets.

If you watch Indiana Jones and the dial of fatethen you can see the idea in action towards the end of the film. Of course, without archaeological evidence, it’s impossible to say whether this is actually true. Still, there’s no doubt that Archimedes’ death ray was a plausible invention that the ancient Greeks could have used several thousand years ago.