“It was a sight to be remembered for ages!
Right from Gurus to the clever sages!
He had found the clue for the crown!
Full of joy he ran bare all over the town!”
Have you ever made a monumental discovery or thought of making one and immediately said EUREKA!?
Yes! I know that happened to Archimedes and he uttered these words and after that such monumental discoveries are known as EUREKA moments!
Having read my blogs before I know you can almost feel the ‘factual’ needle bursting the enthusiasm bubble! Actually Archimedes did not say EUREKA (since he was Greek and not Shashi Tharoor’s great grand father!) and also some say that he did not say the words entirely!
Read on!
Let us first recap the original (??) story! After gaining the royal power, King Hieron II of Syracuse in Sicily gave a goldsmith a bar of gold to make it into a crown. After goldsmith delivered the pure gold crown to the king, he was suspicious. The king suspected that the goldsmith had cheated him. The king thought the goldsmith had mixed some of the gold for the cheaper silver, while keeping the leftover gold. However, the king had no way of proving his suspicions, so he asked Archimedes to find out whether the crown was made from pure gold, without damaging the crown!
So Archimedes accepts the challenge and, during a subsequent trip to the public baths, realizes that the more his body sinks into the water, the more water is displaced–making the displaced water an exact measure of his volume. Because gold weighs more than silver, he reasons that a crown mixed with silver would have to be bulkier to reach the same weight as one composed only of gold; therefore it would displace more water than its pure gold counterpart. Realizing he has hit upon a solution, the young Greek math whiz leaps out of the bath and rushes home naked crying “Eureka! Eureka!” Or, translated: “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”!
The first thing is that if he did utter those words then he would have said, “heúrēka”! meaning “I have found (it)”, which is the first person singular perfect indicative active of the verb εὑρίσκω heurískō “I find”.
It is closely related to heuristic, which refers to experience-based techniques for problem-solving, learning, and discovery! In fact I had written about Heuristic and Bias some days back!
Furthermore apparently Archimedes himself never wrote about this episode, although he spent plenty of time detailing the laws of buoyancy and the lever (prompting him to reputedly pronounce: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth”), calculating the ratio of circles we know as pi, and starting along the path to the integral calculus that would not be invented for another 2,000 years, among other mathematical, engineering and physical feats!
The oldest authority for the naked-Archimedes eureka story is Vitruvius, a Roman writer, who included the tale in his introduction to his ninth book of architecture some time in the first century B.C. Because this was nearly 200 years after the event is presumed to have taken place, the story may have been improved in the telling. He could have taken some creative liberties like making the clothes disappear and these words appear!
Many long list of scientists, including Galileo, have read the account and thought “That can’t be right.”!
Much like Newton’s apple (Yes! Even that did not exist! now that is another day! another bubble to burst!), the exclamation persists because of the enduring power of the story! A king! a crafty merchant!, golden crown, a life in the balance and finally a naked Geek or Greek running screaming EUREKA!
Now our thirst for such stories makes it impossible to get away from the drama! Whether there was a EUREKA moment or not, the fact of the matter is that Archimedes was a font of both mathematical insight and smart quotes as well as the hero of some really great stories and he was super intelligent!
Finally, he did get the solution in either way! Now whether he got it in a public bath naked or in a private lab (fully clothed!); it all is up to you and your imagination! The font of both imagination and many loud moments like EUREKA is also the birthday celebrity Thesingu Rajendar or T Rajendar!
Now take a warm bath before you sleep! You may also get a EUREKA moment or good sleep! Good result either way!
Shubh Ratri!
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