Archimedes: The Secret of the Crown
A novel from the series "Novels from the Lives of Scientists"
Archimedes' life as you have never read it: the story of the man who shouted "I found it", told scene by scene.
What you'll learn
- Follow Archimedes' life from his childhood on the shore to his old age as one connected story
- Understand how he exposed the cheating in the crown with water alone, without breaking it
- Understand why wood floats, and how a long stick lifts a heavy stone
- See how a big question grows out of something small: a grain of sand or water spilling over
- Learn how he kept going after he lost his father and his closest friend
- Tell what really happened from what is only told and what the author imagined in every chapter
About this book
A man in the city of Syracuse has not eaten or washed for days, because a puzzle will not leave him: a gold crown whose owner suspects the goldsmith of cheating, and it must not be broken or scratched. Then he steps into the tub at the bathhouse, the water spills over, and he jumps out and runs down the street shouting: "I found it! I found it!"
This is a novel, not a biography. It starts with a boy trying to count the grains of sand on the shore, follows him as a young man in the city of books in Alexandria, and then as the man who moves a huge ship with a single rope and solves the secret of the crown with water. The names, places and discoveries are real, and the years are approximate because he lived more than 2200 years ago. The story is told in scenes and dialogue as if you were watching it.
The science is explained with pictures from daily life: a tub that overflows, a sack of feathers and a sack of sand, a seesaw plank, a rope around a wheel. No equations and no difficult terms. A final section tells you clearly what is real and what is imagined in every chapter.
The book is written in Arabic.
Who this book is for
- Young readers aged 13 to 18
- Lovers of novels and life stories
- Parents looking for useful reading for their children
- Teachers
- Anyone who loves science but not equations
Why read this book
- 14 chapters in 240 pages
- Real names, places and discoveries
- Simple, gripping Arabic
- A line drawing at the start of every chapter
