radiant love

This guy 3D-printed a mirror array to make sunlight propose marriage for him

 

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A post shared by Ben Bartlett (@bencbartlett)

You’ve seen people use flash mobs to propose to their beloved. You’ve seen celebrities help laypeople pop the question. But using an array of mirrors to harness the power of the sun in your marriage proposal? That’s next-level.

Meet Ben Bartlett, a Ph.D. candidate in applied physics at Stanford, who recently shared photos of his high-tech proposal on Reddit and Instagram.

“We’re both huge nerds, and I wanted to do something unique for a proposal, so I designed and 3D-printed a mirror array to ask the question for me,” he wrote on Reddit. “The mirrors are angled so that just before sunset on our 8th anniversary, it reflected the light from the setting sun onto the ground to spell out ‘MARRY ME?’”

Related: 10 romantic movies to get you in the mood for popping the question

Sure enough, photos from the illuminating proposal show the “hexagonal mirror thingy” reflecting the message — clear as day — on the sand of a beach. And in one photo, Ben’s future husband wrote his response in the sand: “Yes!”

3D-printed marriage proposal

If you’ve got a mind for engineering and crafting, Bartlett posted instructions and open-source code from the project on Github, but beware, you’ll encounter terms like “cyanoacrylate” and “angle of incidence” and “matching algorithms.”

Related: Kristen Stewart just announced she’s getting hitched

But you don’t need a degree in applied physics to appreciate the romance at play here. “Man is out here honoring the druids, the Maya, and a million other ancients with sun calculation,” one Reddit user commented. “Our ancestors would be proud.”

Another person wrote, “You ever skim through a post and realize almost immediately that the writer is orders of magnitude smarter than you are? It’s explained well enough that I could sort of wrap my little walnut around the process, but my god, I can’t imagine starting this project from scratch. Well. Done.”

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