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Hey, this is Cellist43. Recently I had to do an over-the-summer report on
buoyancy. I thought I would make it count by sharing with you the basics about
buoyancy.
Buoyancy was discovered by the Greek scientist, Archimedes. Archimedes might
have had a few thoughts about what it took to become buoyant, but he never thought
much about until one day the King of Syracuse, the king who ruled over him,
asked him to solve a problem.
The king's problem was that he had ordered a crown made and when he got it back,
even though it was the right weight, he thought he had been cheated by the
craftsman. So he asked Archimedes to find out a way to tell if he was right.
Well, Archimedes was thinking about all this when he was in the public bath
house one day. His tub was filled to the brim and when he started to get in, he
suddenly jumped up, shouted "Eureka!", and started running down the streets of
Greece, totally naked. He had figured out how to solve the king's problem.
He realized that the bigger an object is, the more water it displaces. That
means that if the king was cheated, the crown should spill more water than a
piece of gold the same amount as the original piece he gave to the craftsman.
Because gold is heavier than silver, the craftsman would have had to have added
extra silver to make it the correct weight. That means there would be more
volume then the original piece, so it would spill more.
This was just Archimedes' first study on what was to become known as buoyancy. In fact,
this story isn't even about buoyancy -- it's about how to measure the volume of an
irregularly shaped object. However, it is told frequently because it is what
started Archimedes on buoyancy.
Archimedes kept studying the relationship between solids and liquids and came up
with a principle. Archimedes' Principle states that when an object is floating
or submerged in a liquid, it is buoyed upward by a force equal to the weight of
the fluid it displaces.
To put it simply, he discovered that when an object is placed in a liquid, it
displaces, or moves away, some of the liquid. The volume of the displaced
liquid is equal to the volume of the object.
If the object weighs more than the upward force, like a brick in water for
example, it will sink. If it weighs less or the same, like pumice in water, it
will float.
Those are basically, well, the basics. I hope I explained them well enough.
Cellist43
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