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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

I mean this in the kindest way, but this is sort of run of the mill 5th grade science fair material. It’s like the author interviewed his nephew about his project and passed it off with clickbait as something major in the world. I was a lot more interested in this:

Most recently, the TV show "Mythbusters" took on Archimedes' death ray three times and never managed to make it work. In 2005, an MIT professor ignited a wooden boat with the technique, but a second attempt failed.

https://web.mit.edu/2.009_gallery/www/2005_other/archimedes/...

Edit: the summary was wrong. The first attempt failed and the second succeeded.

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If it's difficult enough that the mythbusters failed to make it, doesn't that suggest that this isn't in fact "run of the mill 5th grade science"?

No, because failing to make something doesn’t elevate you to the same level of someone much more sophisticated failing to make something. It’s not about the failure though. It’s that the kid basically just set up parabolic mirrors with a heat lamp and measured the temperature change on the focal point, noted it was hotter, and extrapolated that means scaling it up would make it work. That’s great science fair stuff but nothing remarkable. The link I posted of the MIT professor actually making it work was a lot more fascinating because he goes into why specifically it’s hard to make it work at scale - the specific issue is as the mirror count rises and distance grows coordinating the focus on a single spot becomes impossibly hard.

Seriously tho i don’t meant to diss the kids science fair project (which is what the story is about fwiw). It’s cool. But it’s just not more headline worthy than the MIT project linked in my reply - now THAT is awesome.

> the specific issue is as the mirror count rises and distance grows coordinating the focus on a single spot becomes impossibly hard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

I think we do this quite a lot already.

Yes but that’s not using Greek soldiers arranging the mirrors 2000 years ago to focus on ships navigating the ocean. There’s a difference.

I made a scaled down death ray too when I was younger.

It’s called a magnifying glass.

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