Recently, this journal had a special issue regarding water, where topics concerning buoyancy, Archimedes, and clouds (to name but three) were discussed in detail. Archimedes and the Golden Crown Archimedes is credited with many inventions and discoveries, but a story about how he checked a golden crown to show if it had the proper amount of gold used in its making provides an interesting historical tale. of the Ottoman Empire as the markings showed (figure 2), and they could well have a high gold purity. He was skeptical of Vitruvius’s account of how Archimedes determined the fraud in Hiero's crown and in this treatise presented his own theory based on Archimedes’ Law of the Lever and Law of. A sculpture of Archimedes frozen in time. The Golden Crown (Sources) In 1586 at the age of 22, Galileo (1564-1642) wrote a short treatise entitled La Bilancetta (The Little Balance). After all, the cuff-links had been fashioned from gold lira Figure 1. About fifty years ago in Libya, I, too, was presented with a gift of gold, namely, cuff-links! With this recent intimate Archimedean bonding, I felt that I should use density measurement to determine the quality of my gift. Archimedes is then supposed to have had his ‘eureka’ moment in his bath when he realized that he could use the buoyancy force exerted on the crown when it was submerged in water to make his measurement, and, since that time, many generations of scientists have used this same liquid immersion method as the standard for density measurement. Archimedes (287 BC - 212 BC) was an important Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer and philosopher. Archimedes knew that he could not melt the crown down to form a regular shape, say, a cube, and thus calculate the density from mass and volume measurements, so he had to devise another method. What can be in the mind of this person who sits naked in his bath in a busy thoroughfare of Manchester? The story goes that King Hiero II in Syracuse, Sicily, was presented with a new gold crown in the shape of a laurel wreath, and he asked Archimedes to determine whether it was solid gold or some cheap imitation made from base metals. Later, he shows it to the scientist Archimedes, who casts doubt on the crown. Two or three times a week I now pass him and nod to him in a respectful and reverent manner, but he seems to be lost in a world of his own, with an ecstatic look on his face, as we can see in figure 1. Illustrate an Aesop story, and make it both educational and entertaining for kids. In a ceremony, he receives a golden crown. Preliminaries Just recently I have convinced myself that I am on nodding terms with this great gentleman. This experiment uses his density measurement method to find the purity of gold, and additional confirmation of the findings are given by x-ray fluorescence. F EATURES Archimedes and the golden crown Frank Thompson Joule Centre, University of Manchester, Manchester M60 1QD, UK Abstract Archimedes (287–212 BC) is well known for his explanation of buoyancy, and in particular for his ‘eureka’ moment.
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