Quote:They tried this one time on a TV show called Mythbusters, and couldn't get it to work, for whatever reason. They had a huge mirror, too.
Apparently the Mythbusters tackled the problem from scratch without researching previous attempts.
I got interested in this subject a long time ago and recall reading a journal article in which a historian of science discounted the notion that Archimedes had pulled it off because those accounts came much later. The fact that Archimedes might not have done it, however, didn't mean that it couldn't be done--and the historian cited modern attempts that did work. The historian then pointed out that after some successful modern attempt, people always excitedly (and mistakenly) credited Archimedes with doing the same.