A 13yo built a 'death ray' using a 2k-year-old concept from Archimedes

No, because failing to make something doesn’t elevate you to the same level of someone much more sophisticated failing to make something. It’s not about the failure though. It’s that the kid basically just set up parabolic mirrors with a heat lamp and measured the temperature change on the focal point, noted it was hotter, and extrapolated that means scaling it up would make it work. That’s great science fair stuff but nothing remarkable. The link I posted of the MIT professor actually making it work was a lot more fascinating because he goes into why specifically it’s hard to make it work at scale - the specific issue is as the mirror count rises and distance grows coordinating the focus on a single spot becomes impossibly hard.

Seriously tho i don’t meant to diss the kids science fair project (which is what the story is about fwiw). It’s cool. But it’s just not more headline worthy than the MIT project linked in my reply - now THAT is awesome.

I made a scaled down death ray too when I was younger.

It’s called a magnifying glass.