The Bath
The idea: the Eureka story first appears about two hundred years after Archimedes, and its method may not be his.
Read it
Who is in this book
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Danya a child of the Green Asks "how do we know?" -
Lan a child of the Green Goes first; makes a friend in a minute -
Claim Before you check a story, say exactly what it claims from TruthQuest -
Trace Follow a story back to where it started; copies are not sources from TruthQuest -
Weigh Ask who was in a position to know, and when they said it from TruthQuest -
Inkling a child of the Green Names what she notices -
Beto a child of the Green Takes things apart - Tara a child of the Green Listens longest, speaks last
Every recurring character has a short tune, so you can tell who is on stage before a word is said. The tunes play only when you tap, and the Reading Access sound switch turns them off.
The Honest Page
Which parts are true, stretched or made up — and what does nobody know?
True
- The story of King Hiero's gold crown, the bath and Archimedes running naked through Syracuse comes from the Roman writer Vitruvius, in his books on architecture, written about two centuries after Archimedes died. Source
- The crown story is not in any of Archimedes' surviving works. The principle behind it, how things float and push water aside, is: he wrote On Floating Bodies. Source
- Archimedes was born about 287 BC and died about 212 BC, when he was about seventy-five.
- In 1586, at twenty-two, Galileo described a hydrostatic balance that weighs a thing in air and then in water, and wrote that this was probably the method Archimedes followed. Source
Stretched
- Archimedes found the cheat by measuring the water that spilled over. What we simplified: That is Vitruvius's version. Galileo, and many since, thought the spilled water was too little to measure well, and that a balance was more likely.
Made up
- The drying room, the corridor of doors, Claim, Trace and Weigh as people in it, the Friday Paper and the notes in the box are made up. Archimedes, Hiero, Vitruvius, Galileo and their books are real.
Nobody knows
- Whether Archimedes was ever in a bath when the idea came, or ran through the streets shouting 'Eureka'. The first telling we have is two centuries later. Source
Tell it back
Tell the story in your own words: who was there, what went wrong, and what they found out. Then the third page of Danya's two-column notebook goes on your belt.
On your belt: the third page of Danya's two-column notebook.
Your belt lives on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Ring the hammer for someone
Pick this book for someone younger. The link carries only the book, and it will wait for them on the Green.