The works and life of Archimedes

The Great Mechantc Not much is known roughly Archimedes life. He was born in Syracuse on the eastern soaring of Sicily. His father was an astronomer named Feidias. His family was probably quite prosperous, despite many remote beliefs and opinions,as he was accompanied by servants wherever he went and also give wayled, which at that time was very costly.Unlike different spiritual men of his time,he did non travel to other countries, except one, and that the city of Alexandria in Egypt, where at the noteworthy nstitution,Musaeum of Alexandria,he consorted with famous scientists like Conon the Samian,Dositheos,Eratosthenes of Cyrene and others with whom he kept regular contact with,by sending his fetch to them and asking for their opinion before it was published. The exact time of his stay in Alexandria can only be approximately identified,and that among 250-240 bc.During his stay he make a remarkable discoveryhe invented the screw,a pumping machine,whose practical dole out was so great that it was use throughout the known world,and is still used today for pumping liquids and other fossil elements . Basically Archimedess machine was a verticillate serface around an axis inside a tube. By rotation of the light beam this incredible invention could transfer piddle from a lower to a high point. The first recorded use of such an object is in a text by Athenaeus of Naucratis,where he describes of an enormous ship that was designed by Archias of Corinth for the tyrant of Siracuse, Hiero ll.Since this was one of the biggest ships in its time it would be infallible that it would take on water. Therefore, Archimedess screw was used to pump the water fundament into the sea. It is unclear whether or not Archimedes designed this pump for the use on the hip hardly it is widely thought that the great mathematician invented such a tool to help Egyptians maneuver water from lower land to higher for watering the fields. This invention has survived the winds of time a nd is still used today,most recently applyed at draining parts of land in the Netherlands that were underwater and also for stableizing the column of Pisa in 2001.According to information from Arab sources noted by A. Favaro, Archimedes probably made another(prenominal)(prenominal) trip to Egypt, during which he designed and executed several projects on water management of the river Nile, projects which are reported by Arab uthors. Beyond these signs though,essentially we know that Archimedes travelled to Alexandria only once and no other time, since, according to all sources the superior part of his life he spent in his hometown of Syracuse, where he came up with all his theoretical or mechanical discoveries.On the return to his homeland Archimedes made another very important discovery. Hiero wanted a gildeden backsheesh to be made for him so he asked a goldsmith and gave him 772 grams of gold with a mandate to fulfill his wish. And so, the wasnt produced from on the dot gold but had another material inside. This is when Hiero,called Archimedes and asked him to examine the crown without deforming it and find out whether or not gold was the only element that assembled the crown. Archimedes tried for a long time, to figure out the fuss.Then finaly one day when he was bathing,probably in a barel,he realised the extirpation of water when he entered the bath. ,That is when he realised this was directly proportional to the problem of the authenticity of the gold crown, Vitruvius states that Archimedes Jumped out of his bath and ran out shouting constantan , eureka , Basically,what is now known today as Archimedess Principle,states that the olume of displaced fluid is tint to the volume of the submerged object. ln more general terms an two objects with the aforementioned(prenominal) volume and same mass have different density between each other.Archimedes carried out his experiment by getting a photographic plate and putting the crown on one end and the equivelent of gold on the other. Then when submerged in water if the crown is made of Just gold the scale would balance if not it would tip more towards every side. One of Archimedess more controversal discoveries is the harnis of sunlight into a heat ray victimisation a solar mirror. Legend has it that that when Siracuse was under siege y the Romans the building was used to burn the Romans ships.The solar mirror , was in fact not one mirror but many mirrors together,in which solar energy was lay in and then converted into very high heat and when directed to a target,it would cause it to catch fire . Although there were historical references to the appliance ,made by Plutarch , Lucian , Galen , Efstathios and evidence for the use of this weapon in one of the sieges of Constantinople, the existence of this mechanism was questioned by many, with Ren Descartes being one of them and because of that,was regarded a myth .The fact that Archimedes had so discovered the properties of m irrors is demonstrated by a book by German professor Hop History of Physics which states that in 1492 in Venice , the Hellenic professor George Vallas had in his library a book by Archimedes called Mirror , but later lost. So, if Archimedes didnt know enough information about mirrors and was not real about putting them into practice , why would he write a whole book about it? Later researchers tried to make the experiment, employ materials known in the time of Archimedes , but failed or succeeded partially.