Man's Naked Ambition

Excerpt from Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel C. Dennett, Penguin Books, 2006 [p 176-177]


Here is a well-known trajectory: You begin with a heartfelt desire to help other people and the conviction, however well or ill founded, that your guide or club or church is the coalition that can best serve to improve the welfare of others.  If times are particularly tough, this conditional stewardship - I'm doing what's good for the guild because that will be good for everybody - may be displaced by the narrower concern for the integrity of the guild itself, and for good reason: if you believe that the institution in question is the best path to goodness, the goal of preserving it for future projects, still unimagined, can be the most rational higher goal you can define.  It is a short step from this to losing track of or even forgetting the larger purpose and devoting yourself singlemindedly to furthering the interests of the institution, at whatever costs. A conditional or instrumental allegiance can thus become indistinguishable in practice from a commitment to something "good in itself." A further short step perverts this parochial summum bonum to the more selfish goal of doing whatever it takes to keep yourself at the helm of the institution ("Who better than I to lead us to triumph over over adversaries?")

The Buoyant Force

So King Hiero of Syracuse ordered his goldsmith to make him a new crown. The gold was weighed out and given to the goldsmith.  When the goldsmith presented the king with the finished crown, the crown was weighed. The weight matched the original weight of the gold.

However, King Hiero suspected that the crown was not pure gold, so he asked Archimedes to figure out how to test it. The story goes that when Archimedes lowered himself into his bath, the tub overflowed and this inspired him to discover the solution to the crown problem.

With much excitement, Archimedes leapt from the tub, omitting his toga, and streated down the street to the palace crying, "Eureka!  Eureka!"

 

Thus was discovered Archimedes' Principle: an immersed body is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.

To test the crown, Archimedes weighed it in air and again when suspended under water. The loss of weight in water is called Buoyant Force and is the weight of the displaced water.

For example: If the crown weighs 1000 grams in air and 900 grams under water, the buoyant force is 100 grams. Because the density of water is 1.0g/cm³, cm³ can be substituted for grams to get the volume of the crown.

Density = mass/volume, so this density is 1000g/100 cm³ or 10 g/cm³. This is a long way from 19 g/cm³, the density of gold!

It seems the goldsmith alloyed the gold with a cheaper metal and kept the extra gold for himself. So just what is the difference in the alloyed crown such that it has the correct weight? 

The size. 

The alloyed crown must be larger: and so the oft-quoted quip that has never been attributed to Archimedes was also discovered:  Size Matters!

Image: Northern Territorian Mike Foley streaking career began in 1974 when he released his song The International Streaker.  In 2009, after a streak in Ireland, he hoped to put his streaking to a good cause, raising money for charity with producing calenders.  In February 2012 Mike - now 72 - has streaked at iconic spots in more than 20 countries and was on a streaking holiday in New Zealand.  He most recently streaked on a skateboard at sunrise in front of Mount Maunganui on Wednesday. His wife Kay takes the photos and he sells a charity calendar of his antics for Variety*NT each year.


Variety : the children's charity