- [Grant] Today seemed like a good day
to play with my solar scorcher.
How about a stack of pennies?
Yup, they're nothing but liquid metal now.
- So as we see in this
video, Grant Thompson
uses a four-foot magnifying glass
to melt pennies with 2000 degrees of heat.
- Why hasn't this guy tried
to take over the world
with his crazy solar gizmo?
- Why, indeed?
- Why?
(laser sound)
(synthesizer music)
You've seen this technique
employed many times before,
like the rugged survivor type who starts
a campfire with just a chunk of ice.
- [Male] Or the villainous
child down the block
burning ants with his
father's magnifying glass.
- [Female] Or the glass sphere
juggler whose car caught on
fire when he left his props in
the backseat on a sunny day.
- [Male] Okay, that last
one didn't actually happen,
but just look at this guy.
- [Female] It's all solar concentration,
using a glass lens, or
even one made out of ice,
to take a large area of
sunlight and direct it towards
a specific spot by bending and
focusing the rays of light.
- [Male] Solar cells
employ the same principle
harvesting the sun's energy.
And while solar power's a vital part
of our planet's energy future,
it's not quite as awesome as shooting
hot beams of death at your enemies.
But what about solar weapons?
Why isn't Grant Thompson blackmailing the
United Nations with his
devious super weapon?
- [Female] Back in the second century BCE,
Greek inventor, Archimedes,
devised a death ray;
a series of mirrors that reflected
concentrated sunlight onto Roman ships.
Legend has it that Archimedes
actually used the weapon
to defend the walled city of Syracuse.
- [Male] But of course,
numerous historians
failed to mention it,
and modern attempts to recreate
the death ray have been mixed.
- [Female] As humans gradually
entered the space age,
their minds turned to the use of
cosmic solar power concentrators.
- [Male] Sadly, both
Russian Znamya space mirrors
burned up in the
atmosphere back in the 90s.
While operational, Znamya
2 proved capable of
reflecting a three-mile
wide patch of light
onto the dark side of the Earth.
- [Female] And according to a
1945 article in Life magazine,
the Third Reich briefly
entertained the notion of
using a space mirror weapon
to set enemy nations on fire.
But this never came to fruition either.
Just as Znamya couldn't light cities,
this theoretical super weapon
couldn't incinerate them.
- [Male] But that's not to
say space mirrors are useless.
Engineers continue to devise ways they can
help terraform other worlds,
deflect asteroids, and propel
starships through the void
on the solar wind.
- [Female] And as far as
weapons of light are concerned,
there's always laser technology,
in which light is amplified by the
stimulated emission of radiation.
In fact, in April 2013,
the US Navy deployed
a ship-based laser weapon capable of
shooting down drones
and disabling vessels.
- So there you have it.
From melting pennies to laser weaponry.
And what about you guys?
When you were a kid, did you ever haul out
a magnifying glass and
do something embarrassing
like burn an ant's head or
burn of a GI Joe figure's face?
- Let us know in the comments below,
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