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The Eureka Moment of Archimedes
A man running naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!” was not a common sight in ancient Syracuse. The story tells us that the man was Archimedes, the greatest scientist of antiquity and probably one of the greatest in all history. Archimedes had just solved a problem that had occupied him for some time. The problem was to determine the gold purity of a royal crown which had been commissioned by King Hiero. The King was suspicious that the goldsmith had deceived him by using impurities and asked Archimedes to determine whether or not the crown was pure gold.
The word “Eureka” means “I have found it” in Greek. Archimedes had his “Eureka” inspiration while taking a bath and noticing that the water overflowed when he entered the bathtub. This was the discovery of the law of buoyancy. As for the crown, it was found to contain significant content other than gold, by calculating its density from the amount of water displaced in the tub.
Archimedes was born c. 287 BC in the port city of Syracuse in the island of Sicily, a prosperous and powerful Greek city-state at the time. We know some aspects of his life from later Greek and Roman historians. His father was Phidias, an astronomer. Archimedes became a science polymath. He was a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, engineer, inventor, and weapons-designer. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described Archimedes as…
