Archimedes Revisited

摘要

Archimedes’ beautiful principle may be used to determine how an object floats in a vessel of liquid. This, in turn may be used to determine the global configuration associated with a floating object under the assumption that the surface of the liquid is planar. There are instances, however, in which capillary effects conspire to produce significantly nonplanar liquid interfaces and phenomena which is strikingly at odds with the predictions of the Archimedean principle. A most notable instance involves floatation of convex objects with density greater than that of the liquid.