Brenden Sener, 13, of London, Ontario, has won two gold medals and a London Public Library award for his minuscule version of the contraption — a supposed war weapon made up of a large array of mirrors designed to focus and aim sunlight on a target, such as a ship, and cause combustion — according to a paper published in the January issue of the Canadian Science Fair Journal.
The Greek polymath has fascinated Sener since he learned of the inventor during a family vacation to Greece. For his 2022 science project, Sener recreated the Archimedes screw, a device for raising and moving water. But he didn’t stop there.
Sener found the death ray to be one of the more intriguing devices — sometimes referred to as the heat ray. Historical writings suggested that Archimedes used “burning mirrors” to start anchored ships on fire during the siege of Syracuse from 214 to 212 BC.
Praising Sener for insights into Archimedes’ death ray, Cliff Ho, a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, said the project is “an excellent evaluation of the fundamental processes.” The facility is an engineering and science laboratory with the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
While the experiment doesn’t offer “anything significantly new to the scientific literature … his findings were a nice confirmation of the first law of thermodynamics,” which states energy or heat can be transferred, Ho said.
