Marc Carter wrote re Archimedes and "eureka!": >Without looking I'm going to guess that he wanted to know >how to assess the purity of an oddly-shaped bit of precious >metal, and needed to compare volume with weight.
Good recollection, Marc! Or as Wikipedia expresses it: "Archimedes was asked by the local king to detect whether a crown was pure gold, or if the goldsmith had added silver. During his trip to the public bath, he noticed that water is displaced when his body sinks into the bath, and that the volume of water displaced equals the volume of the body immersed in the water. This means that he can measure the density of the crown, and compare it to a bar of pure gold." But: "This story is thought to be a myth, because it was first mentioned by the Roman writer Vitruvius nearly 200 years after the event, and because the method described by Vitruvius would have been inaccurate." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org ------------------------------------------- From: Marc Carter <marc.car...@bakeru.edu> Subject: RE: Re:A brilliant discovery Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2010 09:10:30 -0600 Without looking I'm going to guess that he wanted to know how to assess the purity of an oddly-shaped bit of precious metal, and needed to compare volume with weight. But that's dragged from the deep recesses of my childhood, so I'm probably wrong. m -- Marc Carter, PhD Associate Professor and Chair Department of Psychology College of Arts & Sciences Baker University --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=7081 or send a blank email to leave-7081-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
