The Archimedes' contributions to science Most prominent are Archimedes' principle, the development of the method of exhaustion, the mechanical method or the creation of the first planetarium.
Archimedes of Syracuse was a mathematician, physicist, inventor, engineer and Greek astronomer from the ancient city of Siracusa, on the island of Sicily (287 BC - 212 BC).
It is currently considered one of the three Most important figures in mathematics Of Antiquity together with Euclid and Apollonius, since their contributions meant important scientific advances for the time in the areas of calculation, physics, geometry and astronomy.
In turn, this makes it one of the Most outstanding scientists in history Of humanity.
Although few details of his personal life are known - and those that are known are of dubious reliability - his contributions are known thanks to a series of written letters about his works and achievements that have been preserved until now, belonging To the correspondence he maintained for years with friends and other mathematicians of the time.
Archimedes was famous in his time thanks to his inventions, which attracted the attention of his contemporaries, partly because they were used as devices of war to avoid, with success, numerous Roman invasions.
However, it is said that he affirmed that the only thing really important was mathematics, and that his inventions were merely a product of the pastime of applied geometry, which he found amusing.
In posterity, his works in pure mathematics have been much more appreciated than his inventions.
The 7 most important scientific contributions of Archimedes
1- The Archimedes screw
The Archimedes screw is a device used to carry water from the bottom up through a slope, through a tube or cylinder.
According to the Greek historian Diodorus, this invention facilitated the irrigation of the fertile lands located along the Nile River in ancient Egypt, since the traditional tools required an immense physical effort that exhausted the workers.
The cylinder used has inside it a screw of the same length, which maintains interconnected a system of propellers or fins that perform a rotary movement driven manually by a rotating lever.
In this way, the propellers manage to push any substance from bottom to top, forming a kind of infinite circuit.
2 - The principle of Archimedes
The principle of Archimedes is considered by modern science as one of the most important legacies of the Ancient period.
Throughout the history, and of oral maneral, it has been transmitted that Archimedes arrived at its discovery of Accidental way Thanks to the fact that King Hiero ordered him to check if a gold crown, ordered to be made by him, was made only of pure gold and did not contain any other metal. He had to carry this out without destroying the crown.
It is said that while Archimedes meditated the way to solve this problem decided to take a bath, and when entering the bathtub realized that the water increased of level when he submerged in her.
In this way, he would discover the scientific principle that"every body submerged totally or partially in a fluid (liquid or gas) receives an ascending thrust equal to the weight of the fluid dislodged by the object."
This principle means that the fluids exert an upward-pushing force on any object submerged in them, and that the amount of this thrust force is equal to the weight of the liquid displaced by the submerged body, regardless of its weight.
The explanation of this principle describes the phenomenon of flotation, and is found in its Treaty on floating bodies .
Archimedes' principle has been enormously applied in posterity for the floating of mass-use objects such as submarines, ships, lifejackets and hot air balloons.
3- Archimedes' claw
Archimedes' claw, or iron hand as it is also known, was one of the most formidable weapons of war created by this mathematician, becoming the most important for Sicily's defense of Roman invasions.
According to an investigation by the professors of the University of Drexel Chris Rorres (Department of Mathematics) and Harry Harris (Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture), it was a great lever that counted on a catch hook attached to the lever By means of a chain that hung of her.
Through the lever the hook was manipulated so that it fell on the enemy ship, and the objective was to hook it and raise it to such an extent that when released it could be completely rolled over, or crashed against the rocks of the shore.
Rorres and Harris presented at the Symposium"Extraordinary Machines and Structures of Antiquity"(2001), a miniature representation of this artifact titled"A formidable machine of war: Construction and operation of Archimedes' iron hand"
For the accomplishment of this work they supported in the arguments of the old historians Polibio, Plutarco and Livy Tito.
4- The first planetarium
Based on the testimony of many classical writers such as Cicero, Ovid, Claudian, Martian Chapel, Cassiodorus, Sixth Empiricus and Lactantius, today many scientists attribute to Archimedes the creation of the first rudimentary planetarium.
It is a mechanism constituted by a series of"spheres"that managed to imitate the movement of the planets. So far the details of this mechanism are unknown.
According to Cicero, the planetariums built by Archimedes were two. One of them represented the earth and the various constellations close to it.
In the other, with a single rotation, the sun, the moon and the planets made their own independent movements relative to the fixed stars in the same way they did on a real day. In the latter, in addition, successive phases and eclipses of moon could be observed.
5- Mechanical method
Another of Archimedes' most important contributions to science was the inclusion of a purely mechanical - that is, technical - method in the reasoning and argumentation of geometric problems, which meant an unprecedented way of solving this type of problem at the time.
In the context of Archimedes, geometry was considered as an exclusively theoretical science, and it was common for pure mathematics to descend to other practical sciences in which its principles could be applied.
For this reason, today it is considered as the precursor of mechanics as a scientific discipline.
In the writing in which the mathematician exposes the new method to his friend Eratosthenes, he indicates that it allows to approach questions of mathematics through mechanics, and that in a certain way it is easier to construct the demonstration of a geometrical theorem if already Has some prior practical knowledge, if one does not have any idea about it.
This new method of investigation carried out by Archimedes would be precursor of the informal stage of the discovery and formulation of hypotheses of the modern scientific method.
6- Explanation of the law of the lever
Although the lever is a simple machine that was used since long before Archimedes, it was this one who formulated the principle that explains its operation in his treatise On the balance of the planes.
In the formulation of this law, Archimedes establishes principles that describe the different behaviors of a lever when placing two bodies on it, depending on its weight and its distance from the point of support.
In this way, it points out that two bodies capable of being measured (commensurable), placed on a lever, are balanced when they are at distances inversely proportional to their weight.
In like manner, immeasurable bodies (which can not be measured), but this law was demonstrated by Archimedes only with bodies of the first type.
Its formulation of the principle of the lever is a good example of the application of the mechanical method, as explained in a letter addressed to Dositeo, this was discovered at first by methods of the mechanics that put into practice.
He later formulated them using (theoretical) geometry methods. From this experimentation on bodies also came the notion of center of gravity.
7- Development of the method of exhaustion or exhaustion for scientific demonstration
Exhaustion is a method used in geometry that consists of approximate geometric figures whose area is known, by means of inscription and circumscription, on some other whose area is intended to know.
Although Archimedes was not the creator of this method, it did develop it of master way, being able to calculate through him a precise value of Pi.
Archimedes, using the method of exhaustion, inscribed and circumscribed hexagons to a circumference of diameter 1, reducing to absurd the difference between the area of the hexagons and that of the circumference.
To do this, bisected the hexagons creating polygons of up to 16 sides, as seen in the previous figure.
In this way, he went on to specify that the value of pi (of the relation between the length of a circumference and its diameter) lies between the values 3.14084507... and 3.14285714....
Archimedes masterfully used the method of exhaustion because he not only managed to approximate to the calculation of the value of Pi with a margin of error quite low, and therefore, desired, but also, for being Pi an irrational number, through This method and the results obtained laid the foundations that would germinate in the infinitesimal calculus system, and later in the modern integral calculus.
References
- ASSIS, A. (2008). Archimedes, the center of gravity, and the first law of mechanics [online]. Accessed June 10, 2017 in bourabai.ru.
- DIJKSTERHUIS, E. (1956). Archimedes [online]. Accessed on June 9, 2015 on the World Wide Web: books.google.co.ve/books.
- MOLINA, A. (2008). Archimedes' method of investigation of Siracusa: intuition, mechanics and exhaustion [in line]. Consulted the 10 of June of 2017 in the World Wide Webproduccioncientifica.luz.edu.
- O'CONNOR, J. & ROBERTSON, R. (1999). Archimedes of Syracuse [online]. Retrieved June 9, 2017 at history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk.
- PARRA, E. (2009). Archimedes: his life, works and contributions to modern mathematics [online]. Accessed on June 9, 2017 in lfunes.uniandes.edu.co.
- QUINN, L. (2005). Archimedes of Syracuse [online]. Accessed June 9, 2017 at math.ucdenver.edu.
- RORRES, C. & HARRIS, H. (2001). A Formidable War Machine: Construction and Operation of Archimedes' Iron Hand [online]. Accessed June 10, 2017 at cs.drexel.edu.
- VITE, L. (2014). Principle of Archimedes [online]. Retrieved June 10, 2017 at repository.uaeh.edu.mx.