24 Feb Eureka
“Eureka” comes from the Ancient Greek word εὕρηκα heúrēka, meaning “I have found (it)”, which is the first person singular perfect indicative active of the verb εὑρίσκω heuriskō”I find”.It is closely related to heuristic, which refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery.
The exclamation ‘Eureka!’ is famously attributed to the ancient Greek scholar Archimedes. He reportedly proclaimed “Eureka! Eureka!” (i.e. twice) after he had stepped into a bath and noticed that the water level rose whereupon he suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged. (This relation is notwhat is known as Archimedes’ principle—that deals with the upthrust experienced by a body immersed in a fluid.) He then realized that the volume of irregular objects could be measured with precision, a previously intractable problem. He is said to have been so eager to share his discovery that he leapt out of his bathtub and ran through the streets of Syracuse naked.
Archimedes’ insight led to the solution of a problem posed by Hiero of Syracuse, on how to assess the purity of an irregular golden votive crown; he had given his goldsmith the pure gold to be used, and correctly suspected he had been cheated by the goldsmith removing gold and adding the same weight of silver. Equipment for weighing objects with a fair amount of precision already existed, and now that Archimedes could also measure volume, their ratio would give the object’s density, an important indicator of purity (as gold is nearly twice as dense as silver and has significantly greater weight for the same volume of matter at standard temperatures and pressure).
This story first appeared in written form in Vitruvius’s books of architecture, two centuries after it supposedly took place.Some scholars have doubted the accuracy of this tale, saying among other things that the method would have required precise measurements that would have been difficult to make at the time.Galileo Galilei himself weighed in on the controversy, suggesting a design for a hydrostatic balance that could be used to compare the dry weight of an object with the weight of the same object submerged in water. For the problem posed to Archimedes, though, there is a simple method which requires no precision equipment: balance the crown against pure gold in air, and then submerge the scale with crown and gold in water to see if they still balance.
en.Wikipedia
