SERIES ARTICLE
Dawn of Science
4. Archimedes
T Padmanabhan
His work ranged from optics, mechanics and hydrodynamics to
pure mathematics.
In 1965, while excavating for laying the foundation of a new hotel
in Syracuse (Sicily), Italy, the steam-shovel unearthed a tomb-
T Padmanabhan works at stone bearing the picture shown in Figure 1. This was the tomb-
IUCAA, Pune and is stone of Archimedes, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived
interested in all areas and of whose equal there have been only two since then, Newton
of theoretical physics,
and Einstein.
especially those which
have something to do with
It is rather ironic that such a scientist did not come from the centre
gravity.
of intellectual activity at the time – Alexandria (see ‘Dawn of
Previous parts: Science 3’, Resonance, August 2010, p.684). He was born in
Res onance, Vol.15: p.498; Syracuse, about 287 BC. His father was an astronomer of consid-
p.590; 684. erable talent and repute. However, Archimedes did spend some
time in Alexandria training under Euclid’s students. He returned
to his native town, possibly because of his close friendship with
the King of Syracuse, Hieron II.
Archimedes thrived in Syracuse. No other scientist of ancient
times, not even Thales, had so many tales and legends told about
him; the most famous, of course, is the one about ‘Eureka’ and the
principle of buoyancy. Archimedes was responsible for several
Figure 1. Tombstone of inventions and discoveries in the branches of mechanics, hydro-
Archimedes. dynamics, optics and in pure mathematics, the details of which
Courtesy:
are spelt out in nine Greek treatises which are available to us.
http://www.math.s unys b.edu/
~ t on y/ wh at s n ew / c ol um n /
ar c h i m ed es - 0 1 0 0 / He worked out the principle of lever in clear mathematical terms
archimedes3.html (even though several others before him had conjectured about it).
“A small weight at larger distance from a fulcrum can balance a
Keywords
Archimedes, volume of sphere,
large weight nearer to the fulcrum.” This led to the science of
lever, hero of Alexandria, value statics and to the notion of centre of gravity of bodies. Two of the
of pi. volumes by Archimedes – On the Equilibrium of Planes and On
774 RESONANCE September 2010
SERIES ARTICLE
WHEN
WHERE
Floating Bodies – elaborate on the implications of these concepts. Figure 2. (left)
In these volumes, Archimedes spends considerable time estab- Figure 3. (right).
lishing the position of equilibrium of floating bodies of various Courtesy: www.boglewood.com/
sicily/vassal.html
shapes; the results are of considerable importance in naval archi-
tecture.
Archimedes used these principles in several practical devices. He
is supposed to have perfected a hollow helical cylinder which,
when rotated, served as a water pump (Figure 4). He also devised
Figure 4. Archimedes’ wa-
a heavenly globe and a model planetarium depicting the motion of ter pump.
the planets. His engineering tradition influenced several people Courtesy:
http://picsdigger.com/domain/
(see Box 1).
decodingtheheavens.com/
He was, however, a purist and did not really care too
much for these applications. What he was most pleased
with were the results he could obtain in the branch of
pure mathematics – in the determination of areas and
volumes of geometrical shapes. He came up with
ingenious arguments – described in the treatises – On
Sphere and Cylinder and Method – to show that the
volume of a sphere is 4R3/3 and its surface area
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SERIES ARTICLE
Box 1. Other Mechanical Inventions
The engineering tradition of Archimedes influenced several contemporaries and future generations. One
among them who lived in the second century BC was Ctesibius who is responsible for devising a sensible
water clock. He improved upon the more ancient Egyptian ‘clepsydra’, in which water dripping into a
container at a steady rate made a pointer move, indicating time. Ctesibius made the whole device practical,
compact and accurate. In fact, his clock was as accurate as the timepieces of the Middle Ages run by falling
weights. It was only after the invention of the pendulum that the accuracy of measuring time was improved,
After about 120 BC Ptolemic Egypt fell into decadence and by 30 BC it was a Roman Province. Greek science
was virtually over but for an occasional genius like Hero of Alexandria. His most famous invention was a
hollow sphere with two tubes attached to it in which water could be boiled to make steam. The steam escaping
through the tubes made the whole device spin. This was the first steam engine, though unfortunately it was only
used in toys and by priests to deceive gullible believers. Hero also wrote extensively on mechanics elaborating
on the principle of the lever and several simple machines, involving inclined planes, pulleys and levers.
Almost at the same time as Hero was devising the levers, an unknown Chinese named Tsai Lun, made a
breakthrough in China. Chinese historians credit him for inventing the product we now call ‘paper’ from tree
bark and rags. This event took place around AD 105 and in the coming centuries, paper-making spread
westwards. Baghdad had this technique by AD 800 and Europe inherited it after the Crusades (after the 13th
century). In the nineteen centuries since Tsai Lun, this invention is yet to be improved upon!
4R2. To obtain these results he had to use the notion of a solid
being made up of a large number of extremely small pieces. If
only he had used more compact and consistent notations, he
would have discovered integral calculus! Another of his contribu-
tions was in the development of a technique for the computation
of which was used by several later workers as well (see Box 2).
Archimedes could not, unfortunately, end his life in peace. The
king of Syracuse, Hieron II, had a treaty of alliance with Rome.
After his death, his grandson Hieronymus ruled Syracuse. During
If only Archimedes his reign Rome suffered a disastrous defeat by Carthage and
had used more seemed to be quite lost. Hieronymus, misjudging the situation,
compact and switched loyalties to the winning side, Carthage. The Romans did
consistent notations, not like this a bit, and once they recovered, they set a fleet
he would have commanded by Marcellus, thereby laying siege to Syracuse. This
discovered integral started the strange three-year war between the mighty Roman
calculus! fleet and virtually a single man – Archimedes. The mechanical
776 RESONANCE September 2010
SERIES ARTICLE
Box 2. A Piece of Pi
Every ancient civilisation, which built anything of significance, needed to know the length of the perimeter of
a circle of a given diameter. They all knew that the ratio between the circumference and the diameter was a
constant, roughly around 3. The question was to determine it exactly.
Some civilisations (like the ancient Hebrews) were happy with a value of 3; while others had gone for more
accurate values; the Egyptians, for instance, used 22/7 and the Chinese had the value 355/133. It was
Archimedes who devised a systematic method, which allowed one to compute the value of to any desired
accuracy.
His idea was to inscribe and superscribe polygons around a circle and
measure the perimeters of these polygons. When the number of sides
of the polygon increased, the circle got crowded between the poly-
gons (see Figure A) and the perimeters of the polygons offered a
good approximation to the perimeter of the circle. With tremendous
patience, Archimedes used polygons of 96 sides and got for the
value of (3123/994) = 3.14185… which is off the correct value by Figure A
only 1 part in 12,500!
inventions (Figure 5) Archimedes is supposed to have used in this
war probably constituted the first massive application of superior
technological knowledge in warfare. He is said to have con-
structed large mirrors and lenses to set Roman ships on fire and
mechanical cranes to lift ships from the sea. (These details come
from the description of Marcellus in the works of Plutarch, whose
bias in favour of Greeks should not probably be overlooked!) The
Figure 5. A 17th century
engraving shows the ar-
rangement Archimedes is
supposed to have used to
burn Roman ships.
Courtesy:
www.corbisimages.com
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SERIES ARTICLE
Figure 6 (left). Archimedes used his discovery that different objects with the same density and
weight displace equal amounts of fluid to test the purity of the gold crown of the King of Syracuse.
Courtesy: http://neatorama.cachefly.net/images/2008-05/archimedes-eureka.jpg
Figure 7 (right). Death of Archimedes at the hands of a Roman soldier (a sixteenth century mosaic)
Courtesy: http://www.livius.org/a/1/greeks/archimedes_circles.JPG
city fell after three years, though, and Archimedes was killed
(212 BC) by a Roman soldier – apparently much to the disap-
pointment of Marcellus. It is said that Marcellus arranged a
proper funeral with a tombstone as desired by Archimedes.
Our knowledge about Archimedes and his times increased sig-
nificantly in 2003 when historians of mathematics discovered
long lost information in the form of an ancient parchment over-
written by monks nearly a thousand years ago (see [1]). This gives
us information, among other things, about a curious puzzle called
stomachion which involves fairly advanced concepts from com-
Address for Correspondence binatorics. The goal of the stomachion is to determine in how
T Padmanabhan
many ways a particular set of 14 pieces of varied planar figures
IUCAA, Post Bag 4
Pune University Campus
can be put together to form a square. In 2003, mathematicians
Ganeshkhind found that the answer is 17152!
Pune 411 007 India.
Email: Suggested Reading
[email protected] [email protected] [1] R Netz and W Noel, The Archimedes Codex, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.
[2] Petr Beckmann, A History of Pi, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1976.
778 RESONANCE September 2010
