Obama on 'Mythbusters': What happened with his 'death ray'?
President Obama鈥檚 鈥渧iewer challenge鈥� was busted on 鈥�Mythbusters鈥� last night. He鈥檇 charged hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage with examining the ancient legend of Archimedes鈥� solar death ray 鈥� supposedly, the Greek scientist used giant mirrors to reflect sunlight towards attacking Roman ships around 212 BC, setting them aflame.
The Obama twist was to use hundreds of mirrors, held by hundreds of San Francisco-area students, to try and light a mock on fire. Change we could believe in! Hope of conflagration! The 2012 campaign is starting early.
It didn鈥檛 work, though. The many, many mirrors, jiggling constantly as the teenagers squirmed while aiming, just couldn鈥檛 combine into one ray that was focused enough to truly heat up the fake ship鈥檚 sail. They got it up to 260潞 degrees Fahrenheit or so, which is pretty hot, but not nearly hot enough for ignition.
They even cheated a little bit, sailing the target so close to the California shore that you could have hit it with a copy of the federal budget. No fire.
The kids involved didn鈥檛 mind. They got free T-shirts and a chance to be on a popular TV show which examines myths and legends of the past, plus movie stunts. (For example, the other thing they looked at last night was whether you could flip an SUV by hitting it really, really, really hard on the hood with a superhero punch. That one didn鈥檛 work either. Maybe they should have used mirrors.)
Anyway, Adam and Jamie reported back to Obama in the White House library, and said his idea hadn鈥檛 worked. He took the failure calmly, thanking them for their time and shaking their hands 鈥� thus setting himself up for some pundit to complain that he鈥檚 not passionate enough about US policy toward ancient scientific experiments.
But at the end Jamie explained that failure in science isn鈥檛 bad. It鈥檚 just the beginning. You鈥檝e ruled something out, and you never know what else you might discover. For instance, to somebody on the boat, the mirrors were very dazzling and distracting, to the point where suspicious attackers might just have sailed away.
So keep at those science projects, you middle school students with deadlines approaching! You know who you are.
