>> Dr. Lanham:
Well, good morning and welcome back to Booth Library. 

This is our final session in this room for our symposium on Ancient Greece. 

And I hope you will joint us this evening at 6:00 in the North Gym of McAfee, where we will have the finale of the symposium, including the Eastern Panther band and a series of presentations, and dancers, and athletic performances. 

So, if you would like to come and see another section of Greek culture, please do so.  

I think it is very appropriate that the hour before hand, before this, we were looking at the arts, and now we are going to look at sciences, to finish the symposium. 

So I'll ask Dr. Wafeek Wahby to introduce our speaker. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Thank you very much, and thank you all for coming to this very last session of the ancient Greece symposium.  

Also known as A Futuristic Look through Ancient Lenses. 

And it has been a long time until it was just an idea, and from small idea, it became what you can see here, and you have copies of the book, I hope you keep that. 

It's a wealth of information. 

Question for you. 

I tell my students a QQ for you. 

Quick Question for you. 

Have you ever lost anything at one time, and you searched everywhere and you didn't find it? 

And you had this feeling of I lost it, and the feeling of searching in places you know it's not there, I know it's not there, but you search, and all of a sudden you find it.  

How's is this feeling? Eureka.  

And I dread to pronounce correctly, and Dr. Daniels tried to correct me, he will say it correctly.  

Or have you been thinking of a problem, and you try to solve it from this side, doesn't solve from that side, doesn't solve and the situation becomes kind of difficult to begin with, and all of a sudden a light bulb pops on, or comes on, I don't know from where, and Eureka! 

Now some of you and some others will say, you kept the best for last. 

And that applies to here. 

We are honored to have the chair of the physics department Dr. Steven Daniels to give us this wonderful Eureka. 

Pronounce it correctly for us. 

>> Dr. Daniels:
Eureka.  

Thank you very much Dr. Wahby.  

It's really a pleasure and an honor to be here today. 

I hope I can do justice to the wonderful presentations that have preceded me. 

I'll do my best.  

So, there we go. 

So, today I am going to talk about a few things, some of Archimedes’ inventions, I guess.  

And I will get to the Eureka moment that he had, but basically he knew a few things about buoyancy. 

There's a scientific principle called Archimedes’ principle actually that is all about buoyancy and floating and things.  

There's a story of a death ray that Archimedes invented at one point and we'll talk a little bit about that, and there's something that's to this day, Archimedes' screw, actually a device that is used to this day, and we'll talk about that a little bit.  

So, Archimedes, just to give you some background, lived from 287 BC - 212 BC in Syracuse.  

There were a lot of things going on in his life. 

Punic wars, I am sure you've heard about some of these things, Hannibal he was under the King Hero, actually King Hero II.  

As with many Greek figures, we look to statutes to try to get an idea of whom this person was, and you know, the Greeks created a number of wonderful statutes over the years. 

Unfortunately, it turns out that Archimedes was not one that the statutes lived through the years, so the one that is generally accepted as being Archimedes, turns out not to be. 

But, we'll accept that that is more or less what he looks like, I don't know.  

Ok, so I want to read a story here from the Truvious, the ten books of Architecture, which was published maybe a hundred or so years after his death. 

A hundred or two hundred years after his death.  

But, he was telling the story of Archimedes' life, so of course, this is a translation, I wish I could do it in the original Greek, but ok, so in the case of Archimedes, although he made many wonderful discoveries, of diverse kinds, yet all of them the following, which I shall relate seems to have been the result of a boundless ingenuity. 

Hero II, after gaining royal power in Syracuse, resolved as a consequence of his successful exploits, oops, sorry, I need to go back, oh well, we'll get there, to place at a certain temple a golden crown on the head of one of the statues to, he'd vowed that for the mortal gods so that they'd be honored. Right? 

He contracted for making it at a fixed price, weighed out a precise amount of gold to the contractor, at the appointed time, he delivered to the kings satisfaction, an exquisite piece of handiwork, and it appeared that in weight the crown corresponded precisely to what he'd been given. 

So it was probably a crown something like this.  

Ok, but afterwards a charge was made and I read in other places, a rumor started, but a charge was made that the gold had been abstracted and an equivalent weight of silver had been replaced for the manufacture. 

So Hero, thinking it an outrage, that he'd been tricked, and yet, not knowing how to define the theft, he couldn't prove it, requested Archimedes to consider the matter.  

So, Archimedes while the case was still on his mind, happened to go to the bath, and on getting into the tub, observed that the more his body sank into the water, the more water ran out over the edge of the tub. 

So, at this, he pointed out the way to explain the case in question. 

Without a moment's delay and transported with joy, he jumped out of the tub, rushed home naked, crying with a loud voice, that he had found what he was seeking, for as he ran, he shouted repeatedly, in Greek, "Eureka! Eureka!" which means, in Greek, I found it!  

Ok, so here's the deal. 

Oh well let me finish the story, I guess. 

Taking this as the beginning of his discovery, it is said that he made two masses of the same weight as the crown, one gold, and the other silver. 

After making them, he filled a large vessel with water, to the very brim, he dropped the mass of silver into it, as much water ran out, equal to the bulk of that silver, sunken the vessel. 

Then, taking out the silver, he poured the water back in the container, and dropped, measured the amount of water that had come out, and then he goes back and does essentially the same experiment with gold. 

And he realizes that in fact he has more water than gold, for the same weight. 

Ok, after the experiment, he dropped the mass of gold, ok, so finally he takes the same vessel of water, he drops the crown in, and measures the water that comes out of it. 

Ok, and when he finds out that more water came out than the mass of gold had put out, clearly what he had proven was that there was some silver in the gold.  

Ok, that's the story of Eureka! 

But there's a problem with it. 

Ok, yesterday I decided to run the experiment myself. 

Only I didn't use gold and silver, I used copper and zinc, but it's essentially the same. 

These two pieces of material are the same, to within a tenth of a gram. 

They are reasonably equal. 

And if you drop one of them into the water, and collect the water, and you drop, and measure that water, and then you drop the other into some water, after filling it all the way, and collect the water, what I found was, first of all, even with this precise measuring device, which reads to the tenth of the milliliter, I mean this is really pretty precise, the results were backwards. 

It didn't work, and other scientists have looked at it, and said the same thing. 

That essentially with the things that [00:11:01.03] Archimedes was working with, though as related there, the story probably it can't be true.  

I mean he probably wouldn't have gotten conclusive results because there is so little difference between the two, but he did have available a way to do it, that does make sense, and could very well have worked.  

If instead of measuring the amount of water that gets poured out, you look at the buoyancy that the water creates, you get a slightly different result.  

So, what he did, what I believe he did, was he balanced, I hope I can balance it, he balanced his two masses, one could have been the crown, and one could have been just a piece of gold, that was the same weight as the crown. 

Right? So, you balance two masses, now that might take a second for me here, ok, so you balance two masses like that, and if you can do it just so, so that your stick is level, ok, stick is relatively level, now we take that same two masses, and we drop them in water, and watch the stick. Is it level?  

Not anymore. 

All right. 

The object that has the greater density, we don't want to leave any rings, aw maybe I'll just leave it in for now, the object with the greater density, the copper in this case, or the gold, sunk further, the object with the larger density had more buoyant force from the water pushing up on it.  

More water was displaced in that case. 

That's a simple experiment that Archimedes could have done, and that showed immediately that yes, there was more density in one thing than the other. 

And, it wouldn't have mattered what the shape of the crown was. 

One of the issues that he had was this crown was exquisitely made. 

You couldn't destroy it, you couldn't hurt it, he was under that constraint on the whole thing, so he had to figure out a way that wasn't going to hurt the crown. 

And this is it. 

And so, you do this experiment, and sure enough, the crown was raised up higher than the other one.  

Instantly the thief, the contractor was convicted. 

This is it, he must have done wrong.

 And that is the story of Eureka!

[00:14:24.08]

I believe.  

Ok, now Archimedes was also famous for something that was called the Death Ray. 

This has wormed its way into even popular culture; I've seen it in a video game. 

The Archimedes death ray. 

It's a clever idea. 

Basically what's its concept is, is that he will use mirrors to focus the sun's light onto the hull of a ship. 

And if you can do enough focusing you might have a shot at burning the ship up. Right? 

You light the ship on fire; fire is really bad for a ship. 

Not a good thing. 

Those people are not going to be happy if you light their ship on fire. 

So, the basic concept is that. 

Have you heard of the Mythbusters? 

If you came to this talk, you must have. 

Ok, they took on this very problem. 

They said, did it happen, was it for real?  

Well, I am going to have to, oops, I am going to try, to play a video of the Mythbusters doing a problem. 

[Video plays]

Ok, so ultimately the Mythbusters negated the whole thing couldn't be done, it wasn't going to work. 

There was a class at MIT that said, you know what, we are going to take another look at this. 

And we are going to see what we can find. [00:20:33.23] 

So let's go back to this, ok, so basically, the basic idea is quite simple. 

You've got the sun, you put some mirrors on the shore, and you focus, you shine, you reflect the light from each mirror to the same place on the boat.  

And the more light you get on the boat, the more energy that is being deposited and the more heat that will develop. 

That's the idea.  

So, some MIT people decided to do this, give it a try, it was a class, actually, in 2009, what they did, the first thing they did, was they got 129 mirrors, about one foot by one foot, handed it all to people, and said, ok, let's shine it on this mockup of the boat that we've got. 

They had a guy with a bull horn, they had a guy with a measuring device, they were all set, and what they found was it is nearly impossible to get 129 people to point the mirror at the right place, because you can't tell where your mirror is going when you've got 129 bright spots over there. 

You can't tell which one is yours and which one is not yours, and all that, so it turns out that they ran into a lot of trouble with that, and they couldn't really do it, as such. 

So they decided again, to try a little bit harder, they set up a hundred feet from the mock-up they set up their mirrors again, but this time, they had an aiming system that they worked out. 

And they got the aiming system going, and it was basically they would aim one mirror at a time, and then they'd cover it, and then the next one, and they'd cover it, and they aimed all the mirrors, 129 of them, I think it was down to 127, they broke a couple in the process, but they aimed all these mirrors, and well, there were a number of different tricks involved here.  

One of the issues was, you aim mirror number one, and the sun moves, you aim mirror number 2, you have a problem there, right? So you saw at the beginning, there was an X in the middle, that X was their aiming mirror. 

And what they did was, they kept aiming for the X. 

So each mirror aimed where the X was. 

So that as the sun moved, you were redirecting to the right place. 

So each mirror was getting pointed to the correct place each time. 

And this is what happened. 

They got a very bright spot, all of a sudden. 

One of the interesting things about this was, the sun moves, and as the sun moves, so does the spot there, that thing was moving about 6 inches a minutes, or something, so it's just racing across. 

But there's a lot of alignment involved, but we are getting somewhere now. 

Ok, guess what. 

They did it. 

They managed to light the ship, their mock-up ship. 

There are a couple of things that were important about this. 

One, that they did it, right? 

That's important. 

They had done a back of the end of calculation just the basic calculation to see how much it would take to do, and see if it could be done, and their calculation said, yes it can be done, you just have to have this much light and this much mirrors pointed in the right place. 

They proceeded with their class to show that hey the science is right. 

If the science says it can be done, it can be done. 

So they did it. 

They managed to do it.  

They did it with an oak mock-up. 

It turns out that ships of the day probably wouldn’t have been oak. Oak is so much more dense, than they probably would have used. 

They probably would have been using something like cypress that would light even easier. 

So, that works in their favor, to say maybe this isn't gong to be so bad. 

The oak, you want oak, where you need strength in a ship. 

Certainly the front end here, that bow, if you are going to ram people, you are probably going to want that to be oak, and you want your rudder to be oak, because in order to be able to steer, you are going to put some force on that thing, but the basic hull itself, is probably going to be mostly cypress. 

Which gave them a shot of burning it even easier than these guys did.  

But this isn't easy. 

They still had to do a lot of alignment. 

So, which is probably why the same thing didn't go down through the centuries as a warfare item forever, because he'd figured it out, but he'd figured it out once, and it wasn't going to work for just any body any time, unless they really put it together carefully. 

Nonetheless, MIT they managed to do it. 

Ok, so then, so in some sense, what I would claim is we now have busted the Mythbuster's busting of this thing. 

All right.  

MIT proved that it could be done; I want to believe because the stories are so good, and the history just makes it sound like it's got to be true, I want to believe that Archimedes did manage to do that at least once.  

I just want to believe.  

[00:26:23.27]

Ok, so in Syracuse, it turns out, I don't know if you noticed, there was a lot of war going on in his lifetime. 

And he was up against trying to figure out war machines all the time. 

Well, they decided to make a big boat. 

An extra big boat to try to help their war machine. 

Bigger boat, more war, right? 

Ok, so they made this big boat, and what they discovered was, it was filling with water at the bottom, and the bilge was going to be a problem, so they go back to Archimedes and say, can you fix our problem? 

We are going to have a boat that is going to leak too much. 

And Archimedes decided on this strategy. 

If you make a screw like this, and just rotate it, it can lift the water up, and it lifts the water, little by little, up here and this could be dumped out. 

So basically, Archimedes screw was first used as a bilge pump. 

But it worked. 

It worked spectacularly. 

It worked so spectacularly, that they still build them today, not necessarily bilge pumps, but they build Archimedes’ screw systems today.  

It's straightforward, you are going to get water from the bottom, you are just going to turn the screw and that it going to push the water up to the top, and you can pour it out wherever you want it. 

So you can get water out of the bilge, and over the side of the deck, or wherever you want, ok, it's a really simple concept.  

But, somebody had to come up with it. 

Archimedes was the man. 

He, like I said, it's actually employed now, maybe more for irrigation, than anything else. 

A real picture of the crops in the Nile delta. 

They are used, they are still used today. 

Ok, well, Archimedes, I've talked about a couple different inventions of Archimedes, all things come to an end, including Archimedes, even that is a somewhat interesting story, I guess. 

Ok, in 1212 BC, Syracuse where he was living, was sacked by the Romans, they Marcellus was the leader of the band that was taking over, they understood who Archimedes was. 

They knew this was a pretty smart guy. 

And maybe it would be a good idea to capture him, and bring him back to Rome, and have him invent war machines for them. 

That seemed like a good idea, so Marcellus gave orders, that he was not to be injured, and was to be captured, but he also gave orders that you go ahead and sack the town. 

We are ready to take this town over, go ahead, steal whatever you want, we have now conquered Syracuse, we are going to plunder it now. 

So, a soldier was plundering Archimedes' house, didn't realize who he had there, and killed him in the process. 

Now the story goes, and I wonder whether this was just embellishments on the wonderful life of Archimedes, but the story goes that Archimedes was too busy drawing in the dirt, that he was trying to work something out, that when the soldier came in, and basically said "Who are you?" Archimedes just said, "Don't bother my dirt." 

Don't mess with this, and the solider didn't understand what he's doing and just whacked him away. 

That was it. 

Kind of a sad ending to Archimedes. 

So, put this together, the first thing that I want you to realize is, there are a lot of stories about inventions that Archimedes gets credit for, but not all of them are well-documented. 

And the thing I read you was more than a hundred years after his death. 

That may or may not have any bearing on what really was happening.

 Right? 

These are stories that are handed down at some level. 

So, not all of them are documented, certainly, some of them could be embellishments. 

That death ray, there's a theory out there that the death ray was actually a steam cannon, which again, he could have built, it's possible, and a good cannon, a better cannon, than anybody else had, would certainly have shocked the opponents, and probably killed a lot of them. 

It would have been a bad thing, right? 

So, it's possible that that was how he destroyed the ships. 

His whole point was he wanted to destroy those ships, at about you know, one bow shot length, that was kind of the point of the death ray, get them within about the distance you could shoot a bow, and now we'll just annihilate them right now. 

Well, a cannon would do that. 

If you can get the right cannon, and there are plans that have been drawn up for steam cannons that would do that, but I still like the death ray concept. 

It's just such elegant science.  

Ok, so, he was a great scientist, a great inventor, no doubt about that. 

In fact, if you really look into his life, he's probably even more known for being a great mathematician, which I haven't even touched on. 

But he's done a lot of good math, too.  

Through this study I have learned a great amount of respect for Archimedes with the kinds of things that he was working with, and the kinds of results that he got. 

That these answers last until today, and you know the truth that he found is still a truth today. I think that is just amazing. 

And with that, I'll ask, are there any questions? 

[applause]

>> Dr. Wahby:
That was really fun.  

Any questions.  

Wait for the microphone for the taping. 

>>  Attendee:
The version I heard of the death ray story is that it was actually the sails of the ships. Did you run across that at all? 

>> Dr. Daniels:
Yes, the answer for that one is that the sails, first of all, if you were going into battle, you probably aren't going to have the sails up, because a flaming arrow destroys your whole ship, you know, just one, and that's it.  

Whereas a flaming arrow that lands on the deck, you can probably put it out. 

So you probably aren't going to have the sails up, that means that they are all furled, they are all tight together, that's a small target again, it's a white target, which means that it probably isn't going to absorb nearly as much.  

You are probably better off shooting at the tar, down at the water's edge, than you are shooting at the white sail. 

So, yeah, I ran across that, and they said, nah, probably not the sails. 

That's not a good target.  

From a Military point of view. 

But a good question, nonetheless. 

>> Attendee 2:
This is the first time I've heard about mirrors. 

Was they back then or what? 

>> Dr. Daniels:
Well, all you would have to do, they probably didn't use silvered mirrors, like we use today. 

Or aluminized mirrors, or whatever we use today. 

But all you have to do it take a shield, and polish it a little bit. 

The brass becomes about 80 percent as shiny as a mirror, so you probably, you do this calculation for the mirrors we have, and you say ok, well we just have to expand that by about 20 percent more, and use brass, and that's probably what he was doing, or bronze, that's probably what he was doing. 

He could do it with shields, so you know it's a piece of equipment that their soldiers already have, it's just a matter of making it right for the job. 

>>  Attendee 2:
Its just, mirrors just blew my mind. 

>> Dr. Daniels:
Yeah, mirrors through the whole thing out of whack, yeah. 

That's true. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Other Questions? 

Yes.

>>
How long did it take the MIT team to set that boat on fire? 

>> Dr. Daniels:
Once they got everything aligned, it took them a while to get it aligned, once they got it aligned, it was a matter of minutes, like less than 10 minutes.  

And it was burning.  

And what I'm saying with the moving across, at 6 inches per minutes, that really meant they just had to get it aligned, and then it wasn't like they were heating one spot then. 

It got to the spot that it decided to ignite. 

So, it was a matter of a minute or two, probably on that spot, that it actually managed to get ignition. 

Yep, it was pretty quick.  

And you could imagine you know, if I am doing this, I did the calculation, 129, ok, now I go to my soldiers and I say I need five thousand soldiers. 

Because I am not going to do this with 129. 

I am going to do this with overkill, by a lot, and that's probably what happened, they went to as many soldiers as they could, and they aimed for overkill, big time. 

Get as many polished surfaces, as they can, not just the minimum that would do it.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
Any other questions? 

Have you read anything about something Alexandria had this big lighthouse at the time, and they had the big things and the fire?

>> Dr. Daniels:
Yeah, it was one of the world’s wonders. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Light or something that they, not necessarily make fire but frightened and kind of blind the ships coming into Alexandria, 

>> Dr. Daniels:
I thought it was just supposed to basically what we were doing, as a lighthouse, what we've done for years, as lighthouses, sort of letting people know where the port is, but maybe there was more to it, maybe there was a defense part. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Any other questions?  

These stories were documented from the ancient as they were, or 

>> Dr. Daniels:
Yeah, the basic ideas of these stories were documented within a hundred or two hundred years of his life. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
And they were not lost in the wars and the destruction, or earthquakes or anything? 

>> Dr. Daniels:
Right. Right.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
Ok, well, I couldn't find a better way to end the symposium except for one evening of music and dance and everything but no drinks, right? 

So, except water if you like, well, would you please stand with me so that we end this in a big note, preparing for a final, so just stand up with me, and give a hand to our speaker.

>> Dr. Daniels:
Actually give a hand to Dr. Wahby. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Thank you very much. 

Thank you very much.