“It was a dramatic moment in the history of our civilisation when, in about the year 240 B. C., Archimedes leapt out of his bath and ran naked into the street of Syracuse shouting "Eureka" - "I have found it!" He had found the theoretical answer to a practical problem, that of finding the specific gravity of solids, known ever since as "Archimedes' Principle". We know this because Archimedes had written and published many books, on mathematics and mechanics, and some of these have survived and are preserved in libraries for us to use today. He made a major contribution to the progress of humanity, and over the centuries, that progress has been continually stimulated and accelerated by the invention of new theories, new tools and machines, which explain our world, and lighten the burden of securing the basic necessities of life.”

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It was a dramatic moment in the history of our civilisation when, in about the year 240 B. C., Archimedes leapt out of …" by Douglas John Foskett?
Douglas John Foskett photo
Douglas John Foskett 24
1918–2004

Related quotes

Plutarch photo

“And Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a manner of computing the proportion of gold in King Hiero's crown by seeing the water flowing over the bathing-stool. He leaped up as one possessed or inspired, crying, "I have found it! Eureka!"”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Pleasure not attainable according to Epicurus, 11
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Newton Lee photo
Tim Berners-Lee photo

“I don't believe in the sort of eureka moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time. And it wasn't that suddenly it came to him.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee (podcast/audio plus transcript) http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html

Lucio Russo photo

“About Archimedes one remembers that he did strange things: he ran around naked shouting Heureka!, plunged crowns into water, drew geometric figures as he was about to be killed, and so on. … One ends up forgetting he was a scientist of whom we still have many writings.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

1.1, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution", p. 6
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Thomas Little Heath photo
G. H. Hardy photo
G. H. Hardy photo
Thomas Little Heath photo

Related topics