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A rickety fishing boat faced off Saturday against one professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wielding a bullhorn and six mechanical engineering students manipulating 300 mirrors, and survived their attempt to duplicate a fabled "death ray" that torched a Roman fleet 2,000 years ago.
There was smoke. There was charring.
Eventually, after focusing hot beams of light on one side of the boat for more than 2 1/2 hours, and dragging the vessel to within 75 feet of the array of mirrors, there was even a small fire.
"We have flames inside," came the excited cry from a man standing on the deck of 30-foot wooden boat floating in between piers at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. "It's coming inside from cracks in the boat."
The crowd, which included a film crew from the TV show MythBusters, a Discovery Channel series, erupted in whoops, cheers, clapping and hurrahs.
But when the fire fizzled a couple minutes later, they dissolved into wisecracks.
"Maybe it's not a death ray," one person said. "It's an ouch ray."
"It's a marshmallow ray," said another.
Still, MIT Professor David Wallace wasn't willing to concede defeat.
"I still don't want to be a person to underestimate Archimedes," he said, referring to the Greek mathematician who, according to some historical writings, tilted a polished mirror toward the sun and ignited a fire that consumed a fleet of approaching Roman warships during the siege of Syracuse in 212 B.C.
Last week, Wallace and his students used the makeshift "death ray" technology provided by 129 mirrors to set an oaken ship hull on fire in a courtyard on their campus in Cambridge, Mass.
They came to San Francisco hoping to ignite a boat in the water, just like Archimedes.
Wallace said if the experiment could be conducted on a larger scale, using more mirrors, it just might work.
Peter Rees, executive producer of MythBusters, which will air a show about the experiment next year, doubts the veracity of the fable. "Who would go to all the trouble to do this when it only works for two hours of the day, when it can only be aimed at targets to the south, when it doesn't work on days when it's overcast -- and when you could just shoot a flaming arrow to ignite another ship?" he asked.
The show, which had tried and failed to build a working version of the death ray, flew Wallace and his students to San Francisco to give them the chance to duplicate the fabled feat.
For Nathan Ball, a 22-year-old mechanical engineering graduate student who torched the family kitchen with rocket fuel when he was in high school, it was a field trip extraordinaire.
"A trip to San Francisco, a chance to burn a boat with mirrors -- it's awesome," he said. "It's like burning ants with a magnifying glass on a huge scale."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/23/DEATHRAY.TMP
There was smoke. There was charring.
Eventually, after focusing hot beams of light on one side of the boat for more than 2 1/2 hours, and dragging the vessel to within 75 feet of the array of mirrors, there was even a small fire.
"We have flames inside," came the excited cry from a man standing on the deck of 30-foot wooden boat floating in between piers at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. "It's coming inside from cracks in the boat."
The crowd, which included a film crew from the TV show MythBusters, a Discovery Channel series, erupted in whoops, cheers, clapping and hurrahs.
But when the fire fizzled a couple minutes later, they dissolved into wisecracks.
"Maybe it's not a death ray," one person said. "It's an ouch ray."
"It's a marshmallow ray," said another.
Still, MIT Professor David Wallace wasn't willing to concede defeat.
"I still don't want to be a person to underestimate Archimedes," he said, referring to the Greek mathematician who, according to some historical writings, tilted a polished mirror toward the sun and ignited a fire that consumed a fleet of approaching Roman warships during the siege of Syracuse in 212 B.C.
Last week, Wallace and his students used the makeshift "death ray" technology provided by 129 mirrors to set an oaken ship hull on fire in a courtyard on their campus in Cambridge, Mass.
They came to San Francisco hoping to ignite a boat in the water, just like Archimedes.
Wallace said if the experiment could be conducted on a larger scale, using more mirrors, it just might work.
Peter Rees, executive producer of MythBusters, which will air a show about the experiment next year, doubts the veracity of the fable. "Who would go to all the trouble to do this when it only works for two hours of the day, when it can only be aimed at targets to the south, when it doesn't work on days when it's overcast -- and when you could just shoot a flaming arrow to ignite another ship?" he asked.
The show, which had tried and failed to build a working version of the death ray, flew Wallace and his students to San Francisco to give them the chance to duplicate the fabled feat.
For Nathan Ball, a 22-year-old mechanical engineering graduate student who torched the family kitchen with rocket fuel when he was in high school, it was a field trip extraordinaire.
"A trip to San Francisco, a chance to burn a boat with mirrors -- it's awesome," he said. "It's like burning ants with a magnifying glass on a huge scale."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/23/DEATHRAY.TMP
