First, Archimedes' epiphany about volume measurement seems rather humdrum compared to his other Eureka-worthy insights it's hard to imagine him exulting in the streets about it. The trouble with Vitruvius's scenario is twofold. Eureka! The mundane had become momentous to find the crown's volume, all Archimedes had to do was immerse the crown in a vessel full of water and measure the spillage. The more of him that was immersed, the more water overflowed. Stepping into his brimful bath, as legend has it, Archimedes noticed water splashing over the rim. But how does one measure the volume of an irregular crown? So if a certain weight of silver had been substituted for the same weight of gold, the crown would occupy a larger space than an identical one of pure gold. Hieron directed Archimedes to establish the crown's makeup without sampling or defacing it in any way.Īrchimedes knew that gold is more dense than silver. Now the king suspected that the completed crown, destined to adorn the statue of a deity, had been cut with less valuable silver and that the smith had pocketed the unused gold. The Syracusan king, Hieron II, had given the royal metal-smith a specific weight of gold to be fashioned into a splendid wreathlike crown. But there it is - as stark as Archimedes supposedly was that memorable day - the Latin word nudus.Īrchimedes was naked and wet, Vitruvius tells us, because only moments earlier, he had leaped from his bath, elated at his flash of insight into a puzzling problem. Where Vitruvius got this story, almost two centuries after Archimedes' death, he doesn't say. The great sage's notorious dash appears in Vitruvius' book right after instructions on how to use the Pythagorean theorem to compute the optimum rise of a staircase. (Here, too, is the description that inspired Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man.) Vitruvius was a great admirer of classical Greek geometers, especially Archimedes. To residents of this long-ago Sicilian city-state, Archimedes had always occupied an enchanted middle ground: one foot planted squarely in the world of men, the other dancing to some private muse of nature.ĭid Archimedes really run stark naked through the streets of Syracuse? And, if he did, what bolt of inspiration sparked his unclothed euphoria? Archimedes' streak is among the oldest running accounts of the dazzle of scientific genius, vying with Plato's story of Archimedes' predecessor Thales absentmindedly falling down a well while pondering the stars.Īrchimedes' naked run first appears, paradoxically, in the work On architecture by the first-century B.C. That Archimedes seemed oblivious to his own nakedness and to onlookers' bemused stares was perhaps only mildly scandalous, given his reputation for eccentricity. It was Archimedes, celebrated mathematician, scientist, inventor, and confidant of the king. The citizens of ancient Syracuse would have recognized the man who is said to have bustled past them naked and dripping and shouting, "Eureka!" (I have found it!).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |