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Like all great discoveries, legend has it that the scientific “Archimedean Principle” was hatched by the famous Greek mathematician while he was taking a bath! It seems that Archimedes had been given a problem to solve by King Hiero. The King had ordered a solid gold crown, but he had reason to believe that the person commissioned to fashion the crown was cheating him. He had paid for pure gold, but he suspected that the crown had been partially filled with something of lesser value. Archimedes struggled unsuccessfully with the problem of how to verify the king’s suspicions until one day, as he was bathing, he came to realize that an object would displace its own weight in water. This discovery enabled him to conduct a test later in which, by immersing the crown in a vessel of water, it was established that the king was right: the crown had not been fashioned out of pure gold. The legend goes on to say that when…