Abstract
In this famous report of what may be the oldest public scientific experiment, several features are remarkable. The performance has almost certainly never been staged (at least with a fully loaded ship);1 it is thus a tale of a staged thought experiment, but a story which for hundreds of years played a continuous role in shaping the relations between Kings, mathematics, war and mechanics. It is a public show before all the assembled ‘media’. It is a direct application of a theoretical demonstration that Archimedes had just completed following a Platonist research program that Plutarch sketches in the paragraph before. It is Archimedes himself who takes the initiative of boasting to the King that he can move the Earth; the King, quite reasonably, challenges him to a ‘show down’ by way of a smaller scale public experiment before believing in the demonstration, as if he was unable to be convinced by the strength of mathematics alone; but it is the King who, in an instant, makes the connection of this striking but futile experiment with a technical and military research program headed by Archimedes (o demiurgos) to protect Syracuse against the Romans.
Archimedes, who was a kinsman and friend of King Hiero, wrote to him that with any given force it was possible to move any given weight; and emboldened, as we are told, by the strength of his demonstration, he declared that, if there were another Earth, and he could go to it, he could move this one. Hiero was astonished and begged him to put his proposition into execution, and show him some great weight moved by a slight force. Archimedes therefore fixed upon a three masted merchantman of the royal fleet, which had been dragged ashore by the great labours of many men, and after putting on board many passengers and the customary freight, he seated himself at a distance from her, and without any great effort, but quietly setting in motion with his hand a system of compound pulleys, drew her towards him smoothly and evenly, as though she were gliding through the water. Amazed at this, then, and comprehending the power of his art (sunnoesas tes tecnes ten dunamin), the King persuaded Archimedes to prepare for him offensive and defensive engines to be used in every kind of siege warfare.
(Plutarch, 1961: xiv, 78–9)
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Latour, B. (1990). The Force and the Reason of Experiment. In: Le Grand, H.E. (eds) Experimental Inquiries. Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2057-6_2
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