I received a ton of emails regarding my post on Thursday about the Archimedes Death Ray recently demonstrated at MIT. Professor David Wallace has posted an FAQ with more info on the project. 
From the FAQ:
…By saying "feasibility estimate confirmed", we mean that our mathematical feasibility estimate was confirmed by the experiment and that the myth is at least possible.
This is not '"myth confirmed" in the Mythbusters sense. In the context of the class, the goal was to verify our order-of-magnitude feasibility estimation and accomplish the effect in a very simple manner that might have been possible in Archimedes' day. We were not trying to make a statement that Archimedes did it (which, of course, one could never prove conclusively). However, it is hard for me to say the death ray was impossible.
