On Wednesday night, President Obama made his debut on the Discovery Channel show “MythBusters,” telling hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage that he is “a big fan … and so are the girls.”
“Nothing is more important to our country’s future than getting young people engaged in math and science,” said the president, who shared that the first family is “just fascinated by science.” He gave the "MythBusters" team kudos for making science fun, adding that they “blow things up, which is always cool.”
But Obama didn’t ask Hyneman and Savage to blow anything up – instead, he wanted them to start a roaring blaze.
The president wanted to test the hypothesis behind Archimedes’s solar ray. As the show explained, “Archimedes designed a solar weapon that focused the sun’s rays with such ferocity, it set an invading Roman Navy ablaze.”
So the pair headed to the West Coast to start trying to light things on fire using bronze mirrors that mimic the bronze shields Archimedes’s soldiers would have used. With 12 people trying to start a fire by aiming their mirrors at the same spot, the trick fails. Even with 300 people, it was all smoke and mirrors – but no fire.
Hyneman and Savage head back to Washington, where the president tells them they are missing a very key element: manpower.
Back to the drawing board they go, enlisting 500 middle and high school students to try to set a boat on fire with mirrors. The boat heats up to about 300 degrees, but the fire remains elusive.
The president’s conclusion? Five-hundred kids who would have loved to see a sailboat turn into a ball of flames, instead helped bust the Archimedes myth.
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