![]() ![]() ![]() With his law of buoyancy, he was able to determine whether a paraboloid (a shape similar to the nose cone of a jetliner) would float upright or tip over, a principle of utmost importance to ship designers. It is very likely that it took advantage of two scientific principles Archimedes discovered. “He came up with fundamental laws of nature, proved them mathematically and then was able to apply them,” Rorres said.Īrchimedes oversaw the defenses of Syracuse, and while death ray mirrors and steam cannons (another supposed Archimedes invention debunked by “Mythbusters”) were too fanciful, the Archimedes claw appears to have been a real weapon used against the Roman navy. Rorres said the singular genius of Archimedes was that he not only was able to solve abstract mathematics problems but also used mathematics to solve physics problems, and he then engineered devices to take advantage of the physics. But in practice, the tiny difference in volume between a crown made of pure gold and one made of a mixture of gold and silver is too small to be reliably measured using ancient technology. According to this story Archimedes, too excited to put on clothes, ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting, “Eureka!”Īs with the mirrors, the underlying principle works. The same might go for the tale of Archimedes figuring out, while sitting in a bathtub, how to tell if the maker of a crown for the king had fraudulently mixed in some silver with the gold. Some of the legends, like using mirrors to set the Roman ships afire, proved too good to be true. Only a handful of Archimedes’ writings survive, and much of what we think we know about him was written centuries after his death. “Here was someone who just changed how we look at the universe,” Rorres said. And there is the Archimedes sphere, a forerunner of the planetarium - a hand-held globe that showed the constellations as well as the locations of the sun and the planets in the sky. There is the Archimedes claw, a weapon that most likely did exist, grabbing onto Roman ships and tipping them over. Besides the Archimedes screw, there is the Archimedes principle, the law of buoyancy that states the upward force on a submerged object equals the weight of the liquid displaced. “He just planted the seeds for so many seminal ideas that could grow over the ages,” said Chris Rorres, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Drexel University, who organized this summer’s conference at NYU.Ī panoply of devices and ideas are named after Archimedes. For thousands of years, farmers have used this simple machine for irrigation: Placed at an angle with one end submerged in a river or a lake, the screw is turned by a handle, lifting water upward and out at the other end.Īnd Archimedes’ ideas are showing up in other fields as well. Rather, it is a mundane contraption attributed to the great Greek mathematician, inventor, engineer and military planner - the Archimedes screw, essentially a corkscrew inside a cylinder - that has a new use in the 21st century. ![]() It has been debunked no fewer than three times on the TV show “Mythbusters” (the third time at the behest of President Barack Obama). The death ray legend has Archimedes using mirrors to concentrate sunlight to incinerate Roman ships attacking his home of Syracuse, the ancient city-state in southeast Sicily. Archimedes didn’t really invent a death ray.īut more than 2,200 years after his death, the ancient Greek’s inventions are still driving technological innovations - so much so that experts from around the world gathered this summer for a conference at New York University on his continuing influence. ![]()
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