ARCHIMEDES’ LIFE AND WORK IN PHYSICS, ENGINEERING, ASTRONOMY AND MATHEMATICS
A. Biography Archimedes of Syracuse (c 287 - c 212 B.C.) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor and astronomer. Although little is known about his life and a significant part of his work was destroyed through the aeons, he is widely accepted as on of the greatest scientists of the classical antiquity. He lived at Syracuse, a Greek Colony in Sicily, Southern Italy, where he spent most of his life and in Alexandria, in Northern Egypt, where he studied at the Great Library and met other leading minds of his era such as Conon of Samos and Eratosthenis of Cyrene. He was killed by a Roman soldier once the Syracuse Siege ended, during the Second Punic War. It is strange, however, that the Roman commander had ordered his troops not to touch Archimedes. B. Astronomy It is said that Archimedes due to his father, Phidias,who was an astronomer, had his first experience with astronomy in a surprisingly young age. He liked watching his father work, trying to calculate Earth’s volume and its distance from the Sun. Archimedes strongly believed that the universe was tremendously bigger than what the others believed at that time, and that the Earth orbits around the Sun! Both of these two points were right. However, he made an important mistake. He supported that the Earth was also much bigger, and calculated it’s perimeter to be 3 million stadia. Eratosthenis conducted his famous experiment in Alexandria. Using some of his astronomical observations and simple geometry he found out accurately that the actual value of Earth’s perimeter was 300.000 stadia. He may had been wrong but it is really interesting that two extraordinary minds of that era challenged each other like that. Of course, what we mentioned above is not enough to characterize Archimedes an astronomer. He did much more than that. He created a machine to calculate the duration of a year. After his death in 212 B.C it was moved to Rome, where it was studied by many scientists. Furthermore he created an astronomical machine that involved glass spheres which were moving with water, showing the position of the 5 planets that were known back then. It is said that he had calculated the distances between them accurately. In fact, it is considered to have been the first planetary system model. Finally, he made an astonishingly accurate hydraulic watch, that helped him calculated the celestial movements much easier.