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Next time you do a sailboat regatta and before your
Rangers start sanding and shaping their
little balsa wood boats ask them this
question:
How are enormously heavy steel ships able to stay
afloat? (you should get some interesting answers especially from Buckaroos and
Straight Arrows).
answer:
Big ships pretty much look as though they defy the
basic laws of nature but in fact they are obeying God's law of nature called
Buoyancy. Greek mathematician Archimedes reportedly discovered buoyancy while
taking a bath.
The trick in building ships so that they don't go
straight down to the bottom of the ocean, is to get the shape just right. The
vessel has to be configured so that it will be buoyant,(float), displacing a
volume of water weighing as much as it does. In other words if an amount of
steel equal to that in a giant tanker were rolled into a compact ball and
dropped into the sea, bye, bye ball! But if the metal is spread out over a
thousand feet, the ship can cross the ocean.
the next question is how do planes stay in the air
--- but that's another story.......
Cdr Jen
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