How Long Has The Olympic Flame Been Burning

The Olympic Flame was lit from the sun'due south rays using a parabolic mirror, during the final dress rehearsal for the lighting ceremony at Ancient Olympia, in southwestern Greece, on Monday, Oct. 23, 2017. AP

Afterwards 101 days of traveling by airplane, railroad train, automobile, Korean warship, zipline and even robot, the Olympic torch finally reached the site of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. Southward Korean figure skater Yuna Kim was called to low-cal the Olympic cauldron in a chiliad, symbolic commencement to the games.

While the blaze looks similar any other, its origins are special: It was lit non with matches or a Nothing lighter, but with a parabolic mirror, echoing rituals from Ancient Greece.

To brush up on algebra, a parabola is a particular blazon of arc that is divers by the exact curvature of its sides. Mathematically, these symmetrical curves all have some form of the equation, Y = Ten^ii. Revolve a parabola around its centrality, and y'all have the shape of a parabolic mirror.

Unlike near curves, which scatter incoming light in many directions, the reflected beams bounce from a parabola and all concentrate to one point, the focus. These reflective surfaces are used in a number of devices to concentrate not merely reflected light, but also audio or radio waves. Satellite dishes, some types of microphones, reflecting telescopes and fifty-fifty machine headlights do good from the reflective properties of parabolic dishes.

In the example of the Olympics, when the sun shines on a parabolic dish, known to the ancient Greeks as a Skaphia or crucible, the rays all bounce off its sides and collect at one blazing hot indicate. Put a piece of paper—or a gas torch—in that focal point, and you lot get fire.

A lone parabolic dish does a decent job heating things upward, achieving temperatures of at least hundreds of degrees. "That'south really very like shooting fish in a barrel to reach," says Jeffrey Gordon, professor of physics at Ben-Gurion Academy of the Negev in State of israel. Some may even exist able to reach temperatures in the thousands of degrees, says Jonathan Hare, a British physicist and science communicator. Hare has witnessed parabolic mirrors vaporize carbon, something that only happens at temps over two,000 degrees Celsius (around 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit).

If conditions are admittedly ideal, light can be concentrated to match the aforementioned temperature as its source, Gordon explains. In the example of the dominicus, that means that the upper temperature limit when concentrating its rays is around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. "No matter what y'all do, no affair how vivid you are, you can never bring whatever object on World to a higher temperature [by concentrating sunlight]," says Gordon.

But, of class, conditions are never ideal. First, some of that heat is lost to the atmosphere. And then, some is absorbed into your reflective surface, and still some other fraction is scattered away due to imperfections in the mirror. "The parabola is a good concentrator merely not a perfect concentrator," Gordon adds.

Gordon's inquiry is focused on pushing the limits of sun concentration to the max. Using multiple concentrating mirrors, his lab has achieved temperatures of nearly 3,000 degrees Celsius (roughly 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit), applying the heat for a range of feats, including a sun-powered surgical laser and a reactor for creating nanomaterials. But at present, at some truly blistering temps, he has a different problem. "We commencement to destroy everything," he says.

In the instance of Olympic torch lighting, the issues are somewhat more than mundane. For one, in that location's the potential for clouds. In the days leading up to the modern torch lighting ceremony at the ancient temple of Hera in Olympia, the organizers calorie-free a flame in a parabolic dish, only in case clouds obscure the sun on the day of the ceremony. The preparedness proved useful at the 2018 games, which took place on the drizzly morn of Oct 24, 2017.

People have practiced the concentration of the sun'due south rays for thousands of years. The about famous example of solar concentration comes from 212 B.C. during the siege of Syracuse, Greece. The Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes used the parabolic mirror, so the story goes, to deter a fleet of budgeted ships, crafting a solar death ray using panels of what was likely polished bronze. Though there's reason to doubt the veracity of these somewhat fantastical claims—including a failed MythBusters' endeavour to replicate the feat—the ancient Greeks did have a handle on the magic of these special curves.

The pomp and circumstance of the Olympic torch relay came about much later. Carl Diem, the chief organizer of the 1936 Summer Games, first proposed the Olympic relay in 1934, to link "artifact and modernity," writes Johann Chapoutot in his book Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe's Classical Past. The flame was supposed to symbolize the blaze that burned on Zeus' chantry during the original Olympic events in 776 B.C. The International Olympic Committee met the idea with enthusiasm—and, incidentally, and then did the Germans who would host the 1936 games in Berlin. As a flashy display of strength and the power of one-time empires, the torch relay readily lent itself for use as Nazi propaganda.

The torch lighting past parabolic mirror came by suggestion of IOC member Jean Ketseas, who proposed they use a ritual flame lighting method as described in Plutarch's Life of Numa. Co-ordinate to Ketseas' translation: "A new fire was lit not by means of another flame only by the 'touch of the pure and immaculate flame of the sun.'" The passage continues later to describe the process: "The Skaphia were placed facing the sunday in such a way that the incandescent rays, converging from all sides towards the heart, rarified the air."

The first torches used in the games were modeled after aboriginal designs, writes Chapoutot. Built by the Krupp Company, Federal republic of germany'south largest armament producer, each one simply burned for 10 minutes. The torches used today take come a long way.

In recent years, organizers take opted for high-tech features to keep the flame lit, no affair the weather. The 2018 Winter Olympic game'southward torch, dreamed upwardly by Korean designer Young Se Kim, had 4 separate walls to ensure the flame can withstand winds upwards to 78 mph. It also had a tri-layered, umbrella-similar comprehend to prevent rain from extinguishing the blaze. It could even withstand temperatures down to -22 degrees Fahrenheit thanks to its internal circulation organisation. If the flame goes out en road, support is always nearby with backup burn lit by parabolic mirror to swiftly relight it. Though the flame averted major disasters in 2018, its robot transporter well-nigh tipped over. Organizers rushed to correct the bot, preserving the flame.

So during the opening ceremony, as the Olympic cauldron is lit, accept a moment to appreciate the fire that roared to life under a glowing bath of full-bodied rays of sunlight. As Greek archaeologist Alexander Philadelphus described during the planning of the starting time torch relay, the warm glow wasn't lit past modernistic mechanics, just rather came directly from Apollo, "the god of low-cal himself."

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How Long Has The Olympic Flame Been Burning,

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/your-burning-questions-about-olympic-torch-answered-180968120/

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