There is a nice story about the Greek philosopher Archimedes. Archimedes would have left his place absolutely nude, screaming “eureka! Eureka”, which, in greek, was supposed to mean “I found”. Thing is, he did find, yes. His king – in Siracusa, I believe) contracted him to find out if his new crown was really made out of pure gold. Thing is that the (bad) alchemists of that time were not to be taken too seriously, for they were masters in the art of augmentation, which was to add metals to alloy to gold, and therefore to keep some gold to themselves, while delivering an adulterated product, but of the right weight, to the costumers. The king of Siracusa had, therefore, the flea on his hear, and asked Archimedes to find out if he had been fouled or not, but with the restriction that the crown should not be dismantled in order to find out what it was made of. This task, well before Christ, was unbearably impossible to be made, even for the most prominent cientist-phylosopher of the time. The amount of thought that Archimedes must have put into work must have been an absurd. He surely was near to a heart attack, when he decided to have a bath. He filled up the tube, but, concerned with the king’s task, he forgot to close the tap when the tube filled up. Suddenly, he realized that the water was running through the top of the bathtub, and decided he would get into it, anyway. And he did so: closed the tap and got in. As he did it, for his amusement, an enormous amount of water runs out of the bath tube! Archimedes was a thinker, as the philosophers should be, anyway, and he begun to think on what would be the causes for the water to run over the tube just because he added his body + the water in the tube. He had the brightest known brainstorm known, and went out of the bath, nude as he was, crying eureka! In fact, I think that anyone of us would have done the same, for he had devised the way to show the king how to make sure the new crown would not be made of anything else but metallic gold. In the presence of the kin, Archimedes asked his royalty to furnish the same amount of gold as it was supposed to be used to prepare the crown. And two tins full of water. By placing the crown in one tin, and verifying the amount of water that it displaced, and placing the amount of gold supposedly used to make such crown in the other tin, and doing the same measurement, Archimedes proved to the king that the crown’s maker had “augmented”. The density of the crown (mass of crown over volume of crown) was less then the density of the gold which was supposed to have been taken to make such crown (mass of gold over volume of gold), and the “densities” were proved by the quantity of water which were displaced from both tins. If the densities were equal, the same amount of water should have been displaced. The moral of the history is that the crown smith was decapitated (so says the story). In any case, the relationship mass/volume entered to history, and is a property of all bodies in Nature. For instance, it simplifies all calculations where you do not want to weigh grams of liquids, but to measure them in mL. In those cases, you will simply use the Archimedes relationship: d= m/v.
2007-09-24 08:38:49
·
answer #1
·
answered by Stanlei K 5
·
0⤊
1⤋