

Do you remember the last time you suddenly got the punchline of a joke or remembered a person’s name that was on the tip of your tongue? That’s a eureka moment. While we may never have the kind of grand realizations that Newton and Einstein had, eureka moments happen to us all the time. In that instant, the theory of relativity was born. He then wondered if a person standing beside the track and a person on the train would see the strikes as simultaneous. He saw a moving train being struck by two bolts of lightning at the same time, one at the front and one at the back. Albert Einstein, after many months of trying to solve intense math problems, let his imagination wander. In that moment, Newton came up with the theory of gravity. Sir Isaac Newton, while sitting under the shade of a tree, was suddenly struck in the head by a falling apple.

The history of science and invention is chock full of eureka moments. At that moment, he jumped out of the bath and ran home naked, crying “Eureka! Eureka!” meaning “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!” To this day, having a sudden flash of insight into a difficult problem is called a eureka moment.

Silver weighs less than gold, so if the crown wasn’t pure gold, but actually a mixture of silver and gold, it would displace more water. He suddenly realized that the volume and purity of the crown could be measured using water displacement. As Archimedes relaxed, he saw that the more his body sunk into the bath, the more the level of the water rose. The king suspected his goldsmith was leaving out some of the gold and substituting it with silver.
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The king of Syracuse had put him in charge of finding out how to detect fraud in the manufacture of a golden crown. For Greek mathematician Archimedes, this happened during a trip to the local baths. Sometimes our best ideas come when we least expect them.
