It is said that the king at that time won a battle and wanted to give a pure gold crown to God, so he found the best craftsman in the country and gave him the gold needed for the crown. The crown was soon made, and it looked golden and perfect, but the king suspected that the craftsman had not used all the gold in the crown, but mixed it with silver.
But the weight of the crown is the same as the original gold, so how to judge whether it is adulterated? The king couldn't figure out a way, so he gave Archimedes the task of identification.
Archimedes thought hard at first, but the disadvantage of him and ordinary people is that when he starts to delve into something, he becomes extremely involved. He doesn't think about tea and rice, and he doesn't even take a shower. After several days, his wife finally couldn't stand the smell of his whole body and urged him to take a bath. Unexpectedly, it helped him a lot.
Archimedes entered the bathtub, looked at the overflowing water and finally had an epiphany. He thought of the key to distinguish whether gold is pure or not. As a result, he ran out naked to test his ideas. Under the same weight, the key to identification is the size of the crown, and there is no way to measure the irregular shape of the crown before. However, Archimedes finally realized that if the crown was completely immersed in a container full of water, it would overflow.
At the same time, he also obtained through experiments that the volume of pure silver with the same weight is much larger than that of pure gold, that is to say, as long as the crown measured by the "overflow method" is larger than the pure gold with the same weight, then this crown is adulterated!
And through a series of experiments, he calculated the proportion of Wang Guanzhong mixed with silver, and the craftsman finally had nothing to say, so he had to confess.
Archimedes' scientific spirit lies not only in his scientific method of accomplishing the king's task, but also in his spirit of searching for the bottom. He didn't stop at "measuring the volume of the crown is larger than the original pure gold", but after measuring the volumes of pure gold and pure silver with the same weight respectively, he went further and solved the ratio of gold to silver in that era when there was no "binary linear equation".
And he has been carrying out this scientific spirit all his life. When the city was finally occupied by Rome, soldiers broke into his home. Archimedes, who was studying mathematical problems in the sand, only said "Don't break my circle" and was killed by the soldier's sword. What a pity.