Archimedes was asked by his king to figure out a way of telling if people were giving him fake gold objects. That was when Archimedes discovered his famous principle: an object placed in water displaces the same volume of water as the object's volume. Explain how Archimedes used this to solve his problem.

Question

Mathematics

Layton Summers

5 January, 01:16

Archimedes was asked by his king to figure out a way of telling if people were giving him fake gold objects. That was when Archimedes discovered his famous principle: an object placed in water displaces the same volume of water as the object's volume. Explain how Archimedes used this to solve his problem.

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Annabel Ortiz · Answer 1

He could use his discovery to figure out the volume of the apparent gold and then weigh it and then divide the weight over the volume to get the density of the gold and see in that way if it had the correct density. This presupposes that the density of gold was already known.