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Archimedes is purported to have invented a large scale solar furnace, sometimes described as a heat ray, and used it to burn attacking Roman ships during the Siege of Syracuse (c. 213–212 BC). It does not appear in the surviving works of Archimedes and there is no contemporary evidence for it, leading to modern scholars doubting its existence.
The purported device, sometimes called "Archimedes' heat ray", has been the subject of an ongoing debate about its credibility since the Renaissance. [58] René Descartes rejected it as false, while modern researchers have attempted to recreate the effect using only the means that would have been available to Archimedes, mostly with negative ...
Archimedes' investigation of paraboloids was possibly an idealization of the shapes of ships' hulls. Some of the paraboloids float with the base under water and the summit above water, similar to the way that icebergs float. Of Archimedes' works that survive, the second book of On Floating Bodies is considered his most mature work. [6]
Archimedes before his death with a Roman soldier – copy of a Roman mosaic from the 2nd century. Marcus Claudius Marcellus had ordered that Archimedes, the well-known mathematician – and possibly equally well-known to Marcellus as the inventor of the mechanical devices that had so dominated the siege – should not be killed. Archimedes, who ...
Legendary accounts of the Siege of Syracuse (213–212 BC) tell of Archimedes' heat ray, a set of burnished brass mirrors or burning glasses supposedly used to ignite attacking ships, though modern historians doubt its veracity. The first modern solar furnace is believed to have been built in France in 1949 by Professor Félix Trombe.
English: Summary of an Archimedes heat ray. In practice, many more mirrors than shown would be needed, and the results may have been merely soldier sweat, temporary blindness, and confusion rather than fire. The mirrors may have consisted of polished metal and had peep-holes drilled in the middle for use in aiming.
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, originally a Byzantine Greek copy of a compilation of Archimedes and other authors. It contains two works of Archimedes that were thought to have been lost (the Ostomachion and the Method of Mechanical Theorems) and the only surviving original Greek edition of his work On Floating ...
The Heat-Ray is a fictional weapon used by the Martians in the novel The War of the Worlds. Heat-Ray may also refer to: Active Denial System, also known as the "heat ray", a non-lethal directed-energy weapon; Archimedes' heat ray; Godzilla's atomic heat beam; A fictional weapon in the novel Danny Dunn and the Heat Ray