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Testing a Gold Crown with Water — Archimedes' Buoyancy and the Eureka Method
Hazardous
Penny

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Penny

2. July 2026DK
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Testing a Gold Crown with Water — Archimedes' Buoyancy and the Eureka Method

King Hiero of Syracuse suspected his goldsmith had cut his crown with cheaper silver, but how do you check without melting it down? Around 250 BC Archimedes solved it in the bath: stepping in, he saw the water rise by his own volume and realised a submerged object displaces its own volume of water. Density — weight divided by volume — then betrays any cheating, because gold is far denser than silver. This blueprint reproduces both the famous displacement test and Archimedes' more precise underwater-balance method, and states the buoyancy principle that floats every ship.
Intermediate
2

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