Was density invented or discovered


To begin with, what is the difference between invented and discovered? “A discovery is recognizing something that already exists for the first time, that nobody has found before, e.g. how Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. An invention is creating something totally new with one's own ideas and development. Although an invention is completely new to the world, the physical material needed for its production already exists, e.g. how Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.”
Density is a physical property of matter that expresses a relationship of mass to volume. The more mass an object contains in a given space, the more dense it is. “ Sometime around 250 BCE, the Greek mathematician Archimedes was given the task of determining whether a craftsman had defrauded the King of Syracuse by replacing some of the gold in the King's crown with silver. Archimedes thought about the problem while relaxing in a bathing pool. As he entered the pool, he noticed that water spilled over the sides of the pool. Archimedes had a moment of epiphany. He realized that the amount of water that spilled was equal in volume to the space that his body occupied. This fact suddenly provided him with a method for differentiating a mixed silver and gold crown from a pure gold crown. Because a measure of silver occupies more space than an equivalent measure of gold, Archimedes placed the craftsman's crown and a pure gold crown of equivalent mass in two tubs of water. He found that more water spilled over the sides of the tub when the craftsman's crown was submerged. It turned out that the craftsman had been defrauding the King.” This is the story about how density was discovered. So from this story, we can see that density was invented , because Archimedes used his knowledge about how silver occupies more space than gold to determine if the crown was à fraud, and the concept of density was then originated.


Work cited:
  • Day, Martha Marie, and Anthony Carpi. “Density | General Science.” Visionlearning, Visionlearning, Inc., 12 Feb. 2017, www.visionlearning.com/en/library/General-Science/3/Density/37.
  • “The Wonders of Invention.” What Is the Difference between a Discovery and an Invention? | The Wonders of Invention, www.med.tottori-u.ac.jp/hatsumeigaku/en/difference.html.

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