The Archimedes Principle by Saanvi Kunisetty

 The Archimedes Principle

Saanvi Kunisetty

The original “discovery” of the concept of density occurred in 287 BC in Syracuse, a Greek colony in Sicily. The idea was developed by notorious mathematician and physicist Archimedes. A king was suspicious if his crown was made from true gold, so he asked Archimedes to find out without damaging the crown itself. Archimedes was thinking about this predicament when he got in the tub, only to notice that water splashed out, and that the deeper he submerged, the more water that was displaced. He realized that there was a relationship between the volume of an object submerged in water, and the volume of the water that is displaced by this action. Knowing that the crown’s density was key, and that gold was denser than silver, he dropped pieces of gold and silver with the same mass into the water, measuring the volume of water that spilled out due to each. The volume of the water that was displaced due to the submerging of the silver bar was indeed greater. With this, Archimedes reasoned that if a gold bar the same mass as the crown was dropped into the water, and an equal amount of water was displaced by both the bar and the crown, then the crown could be concluded to be made of gold. This discovery led to the Archimedes Principle, which states that the weight of the liquid displaced by an object immersed in water is equal to the buoyant force (the force of the fluid pushing up against it) that it experiences. This concept of buoyancy and density explains why some objects sink, while others float.

        To me, it's unbelievable that such a thoughtful discovery could have been made at such an early point in time, when people didn't have deep knowledge about science, or access to the kinds of technology that we have today.

Sources: https://www.bellarmine.edu/learningcommunity/eureka/about/