HOW TO MEASURE DENSITY
King Hieron of Sicily, wanting to find out if a crown he had been given was made of solid gold, or whether he had been palmed off with on containing silver, asked Archimedes to solve the problem. But how was he to do so without melting down the metal and destroying the crown? Interestingly while taking a bath, Archimedes noticed the water level rose when he got in, and he realized that he could determine the gold density of the crown by weighing it in water. He was so excited by this discovery that he reputed to have rushed out naked into the street shouting "EUREKA!" ("I have found it") .
Archimedes was born in 287 b.c.e. in the Greek city-state of Syracuse, Sicily, and is also credited with inventing the lever and the Archimedes screw - a device for lifting water - and for setting fire to Roman ships using mirror and sun's rays during the siege of Syracuse. When the city fell in 212 B.C.E., Archimedes, so it was said, was killed by a Roman soldier because he ignored a commend to leave his mathematical diagrams. Archimedes was held in great respect by the ancient world, both as a practical and theoretical scientist . He wrote on mechanics, hydro-statics, catoptrics (refraction), and mathematics. Although much of his work is lost, his surviving writings were known to Islamic mathematicians in the middle ages. ................
King Hieron of Sicily, wanting to find out if a crown he had been given was made of solid gold, or whether he had been palmed off with on containing silver, asked Archimedes to solve the problem. But how was he to do so without melting down the metal and destroying the crown? Interestingly while taking a bath, Archimedes noticed the water level rose when he got in, and he realized that he could determine the gold density of the crown by weighing it in water. He was so excited by this discovery that he reputed to have rushed out naked into the street shouting "EUREKA!" ("I have found it") .
Archimedes was born in 287 b.c.e. in the Greek city-state of Syracuse, Sicily, and is also credited with inventing the lever and the Archimedes screw - a device for lifting water - and for setting fire to Roman ships using mirror and sun's rays during the siege of Syracuse. When the city fell in 212 B.C.E., Archimedes, so it was said, was killed by a Roman soldier because he ignored a commend to leave his mathematical diagrams. Archimedes was held in great respect by the ancient world, both as a practical and theoretical scientist . He wrote on mechanics, hydro-statics, catoptrics (refraction), and mathematics. Although much of his work is lost, his surviving writings were known to Islamic mathematicians in the middle ages. ................
