burning mirror

The reading claims that the burning mirror, that is a polished copper surface curved to focus the Sun's rays onto Roman ships and causing them to catch fire, is just myth and the Greeks of Syracuse never really built such device, and it provides three reasons of support. In contrast, the professor states that the reasons in the passage are not convincing and she refutes each of the author's reasons.

First, the article avers that the ancient Greeks were not technologically advanced enough to make such a device. However, the lecturer opposes this point by saying that an experiment shows that they didn't have such large mirror, they arranged small mirrors to get the wide they needed. In addition, she mentions that Greeks knew how to have precise parabolic because they used small mirrors to obtain the a curvature and get the shape they wanted to build the burning miror.

Second, the article asserts that the burning mirror would have taken a long time to set the ships on fire. On the other hand, the professor counters this point by stating that the experiment that mentioned in the reading is conducted in wood boat which took ten minutes to fire. Actually, the professor says that the ships contained other materials. According to the professor, they used water proof and sticky material to build the ships, and these material pitch the fire in seconds. In fact, the buring mirror is an effective weapon.

Third, the passage posits that a burning mirror does not seem like an improvement on a weapon that the Greeks already had: flaming arrows. Conversely, the professor casts doubt on this point by explaining that they use buring mirror instead of flaming arrows. She states that soldiers couldn't raise the arrows because of fire, but using burning mirror is easy and they can see the fir through the mirror. She argues that burning mirror was more surprising and effective than flaming arrows.