Woodside students shine at this year's state science fair Woodside students shine at this year's state science fair (June 08, 2005)

** First-place project questioned story about ancient weapon.

By David Boyce

Almanac Staff Writer

Woodside School, known for its prowess at science fairs, scored this year, with 12 students going to the state fair and three coming home with ribbons, including a first-place prize and a large cash award.

The event took place May 23 and 24 in Los Angeles, with 955 student projects entered, all of which had to have been chosen to go the state fair by officials from local science fairs held this year.

At the state fair, Woodside eighth-grader Bryce Cronkite-Ratcliff won $5,000 in cash -- the Arnold O. Beckman Project of the Year Award for the junior division -- and his project took first place in the applied-mechanics category.

Bryce's machine probed the question of whether the ancient Greeks, in defending Syracuse against an invading Roman fleet, could have used an array of mirrors to focus the sun's rays and set fire to enemy ships.

Woodside eighth-grader Mary Poletti, also competing in the applied-mechanics category, won a third-place prize for building a working model of a 19th-century crank-driven static electricity generator. Mary made various technical improvements to increase the voltage, thereby making her machine's electric arc both visible and audible.

In the physics and astronomy category, sixth-grader Nicole Kowtko won third place for confirming her hypothesis that sound decreases exponentially with a linear decrease in air pressure. Nicole's experiment involved ringing a bell inside a vacuum chamber under different air pressure settings.

The other Woodside students whose projects qualified for the state fair are Katherine Gifford, Nick Manning, Lindsay McHugh, Kody Nerhan, Ryan Nowicki, Lauren Palmer, Connor Patrick, Leeann Patrick, and Logan Pike. The faculty advisers were William Dolyniuk and Kevin Kinsella.

Woodside school students took 10 awards at this year's San Francisco Bay Area Science Fair.
A working weapon?

In building his solar array, Bryce said he sought to prove or disprove a story from 213 BC -- related by a couple of 12th-century historians -- about Greek scientist Archimedes. The scientist is said to have designed for Syracuse a set of mirrors to be held by soldiers and choreographed to focus the sun's rays and -- in seconds -- set alight incoming Roman ships while remaining out of bow-and-arrow range.

To create a working array, Bryce said he had to account for the reflectivity of the 1-inch-square mirrors he used, the atmospheric density, the sun's position, and the properties of his temperature sensing device.

To precisely align the 677 mirrors, which he mounted on boards using a flexible silicon putty, he installed three wood screws behind each one.

His array did successfully ignite a primitive wooden stand-in for a Roman ship, which he documented with photographs whose captions include imagined grisly details of the scene on board a targeted vessel.

In extrapolating his findings for a battle scene of several thousand years ago, Bryce said he adjusted his figures to account for the lower reflectivity of bronze mirrors.

The result? To achieve the necessary ignition point of 1,292 degrees Fahrenheit would require a sunny day and some 2,000 bronze mirrors measuring 40 inches on a side and held steady and aimed by some 2,000 soldiers.

"It became, basically, a logistical nightmare," said Bryce, concluding that the existence of such a weapon was unlikely.

Asked why he chose this topic for his science project, Bryce said he likes to explore the integration of history and science and the complexity of trying to address problems of long ago.

In storing his array at home, Bryce said he is careful to cover it lest a random ray of sunshine find its way to the mirrors and set the ceiling on fire.

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