Talk:Archimedes - Knowledge

2603:«In the Hellenistic age, scientists such as Apollonius and Diocles were interested in the theoretical aspects of burning mirrors and may have experimented with them,10 but there is no reference to the practical application of a heat ray in warfare until the second half of the second century A.D. when Lucian mentions in passing that Archimedes burned ships "with his skill" (Hippias 2). Lucian did not identify the weapon, and Galen is the first author to specify mirrors as the source of heat. II Where he picked up the story is not known, but it was commonplace among scholars of the time to attribute all manner of wonders to famed sages of the past. Galen's younger contemporary, Cassius Dio, was also aware of the mirrors, for Zonaras (9.4) mentions them in his epitome of Dio's Fifteenth Book.» 763: 2192:

am not impressed. All of the content is along the lines of "So-and-so says Leucippus says XYZ" where so-and-so was writing a few centuries after Leucippus, but then the link shows that Knowledge's text is a paraphrase of some paywalled academic paper where the author paraphrased an earlier Greek/Roman source who was paraphrasing Leucippus, so what Knowledge readers are getting is 4 steps removed from the original. This helps tick off FA boxes, and might help scholars looking for a list of recent works to cite, but readers would probably be better off with a direct quotation of the oldest extant work or a translation. –

2379:, which is certainly above average for Knowledge articles; it was just your example of exceptional citation formatting, but I don't really like the style with a plethora of footnotes often crammed together but none of them giving any detail or quotations, and in my opinion the primary sources are essential to cite in this kind of article, but there are missing. Your focus on sources from the past decade or two also seems misplaced. To my knowledge Archimedes isn't a subject of such rapid historiographical change that commentary from 50, 100, or 1000 years ago is necessarily obsolete. 2243:

Archimedes works each should be individually referenced with a footnote to the Heath source (which provides commentary, and therefore is a secondary source on the works of Archimedes), as this remains the standard modern reference for Archimedes works. Only the palimpsest, which post-dates Heath, needs to be referenced separately (which it is). In any case, concerns over the lack of sourcing of this section are overwrought, considering the extremely high quality references Knorr and Sato that are very explicitly intended to support the section as a whole.

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good references. Boyer is a tertiary source, generally good (I suggested above for the mathematics section), but there are better secondary sources. Clagett is a very good source, but also specifically focuses on mathematics in the middle ages, and is incredibly detailed: we already cite his survey article on this topic. I think the Dijksterhuis is a good source, particularly for the life of Archimedes, that could be used for some of the history section, and also for the mathematics section.

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paywalls. Heath is terribly outdated and should be used with caution, while Dijksterhuis is about the best your regular, "I don't work for academia" person could have access right now. Believer or not, Heiberg's work still holds on and its packed with lots of good textual and biographical information but you'll have to read German (and Latin!) to make sense of it. Bottom line, the best sources are the most esoteric, hard to reach ones, while the popular sources are often worth crap.

1146: 2282:, it would have been a paragraph long, maybe two. You'll see that I linked almost every page number to google books: readers can click on any one and immediately find the information. How is this difficult to access? By the way, I regularly used plenty of primary sources in Cai Lun and found no issues at FAC; this is because I paired each one with a secondary source, which is certainly more advisable (and productive) than sole reliance on primary sources. 1043: 182: 1642: 1022: 1136: 753: 1115: 722: 344: 1339: 215: 1251: 1230: 1941:. Every featured article needs to be "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature; claims are verifiable against high-quality reliable sources and are supported by inline citations where appropriate". Primary sources are simply not allowed in place of suitable secondary ones. You can disagree with this all you like, but you will find that no reviewers will agree. The aforementioned 414: 386: 1261: 884: 863: 152: 1658: 970: 952: 1871:. This may all sound harsh, but that's because the issues are so woven into the article's structure that most, if not all, sections would need to be completely rewritten to meet FA standards. I understand that various editors have attempted to maintain this page over the yeas, but its existing structure from the 2007 nomination has deeply limited such efforts. 1628: 2497:

every currently unsourced section of this article. It's kind of a lot of grunt work, but especially if we include links to a scan (the IA scan is unfortunately "borrow unavailable, presumably by request of Princeton Univ. Press) should be at least moderately helpful to readers, and might satisfy some of the footnote police. –

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lists multiple works by clearly established historians, and includes direct links to archive.org which is freely available. If one wants to actually engage in a "thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature", this will include academic sources which are sometimes difficult to access.

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doesn't even try to link to the source texts where its claims originate. This does a disservice to readers, because it makes them jump through hoops to figure out what was actually said. I imagine in most if not all cases there are online scans of these texts and probably also translations. Frankly I

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Where are the modern sources? How about the huge Further reading section that includes multiple major recent surveys? Why is not a single one of them included? How can this be "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature; claims are verifiable against high-quality reliable sources

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In any event, it's a somewhat apples-to-oranges comparison because Archimedes is a dramatically more productive, known-about, and influential figure than Leucippus. I agree with you that this article is far from comprehensive, but on the other hand if it were expanded to the level of detail found in

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of academic secondary sources (which extends to the entire article). The FA criteria are explicit in asking for "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature". Outside of the lead, there is a single book on Archimedes sourced. The result is highly noticeable in the article, as you

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The Biography section pulls directly and extensively from ancient sources, without any filtering through modern commentary. Citations are sporadic and inconsistent. The discoveries and mathematics sections are extremely choppy and brief. Every single work of his does not need its own subsection just

1679:

The caption says "A metal bar, placed into a container of water on a scale, displaces as much water as its own volume, increasing the mass of the container's contents and weighing down the scale." This is is incorrect. To see why, suppose the metal bar was replaced by an object of the same shape but

2617:

That's accurate as far as tracing the complicated history of a "scientific" fable goes, and yes most of the time it's a game of broken telephone. But why burden the reader with all of this? Scholars have to make a living after all, sure, but I fail to see how this information will serve the reader.

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Where is there reliance exclusively on primary sources? Tag some specific problems, please. A side note is that many of the sources listed in further reading are very pulpy. E.g., Netz and Noel is not a scholarly or academic source, and some of the others are, rather more obviously, probably not

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The apocryphal story of the "heat ray" has clearly been of interest to readers, and it's worth being clear that it's a legend that is surely made up. I agree the details might be unnecessary here. I'd be fine with condensing the whole section down to a paragraph or so, delegating some details to a

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There is poor sourcing all throughout; aside from non-existent citation formatting and sporadic page numbers, random web sources of highly variable notability are consistently prioritized over academic scholarship. In fact, I can't see that a single contemporary book-length survey of Archimedes is

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Sorry, this is still a weird argument. We know very little about the life of Archimedes other than what was said by Roman historians many years after his death. I'm not sure what these "modern sources" are supposed to be, perhaps you could find them if it is such a problem. I don't have access to

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Dijksterhuis (which I only skimmed parts of) seems like an excellent source, and the consensus seems to be that it is the best available biography. I think we should pull it out in a new section of "Works Cited" or whatever, and then liberally add footnotes citing specific chapters and pages for

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Here are my two cents: Netz has been publishing and translating Archimedes for over two decades, but almost everything worth reading from him is behind paywalls and he believes writing a "biography" of Archimedes is pointless. Knorr is better overall but his work is behind even more impenetrable

2238:

I agree overall with jacobolus and Ian, and appreciate the "high gloss sheen" comment in particular. I think there is no problem citing ancient sources appropriately in the biographical sections. While I haven't looked that closely, everything I looked at sourced to an ancient source also had a

1956:

I understand it is easy to see my comments as " argument", but this is a misunderstanding. I am citing real and rather egregious issues, after having review hundreds of articles for FAC & FAR, in content and source reviews. This article falls extremely flat, and defending it will take you no

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related to the anecdote in question (which is only about using displacement to measure volume). The idea that "the submerged crown would displace an amount of water equal to its own volume" is so simple that I don't think it requires any demonstration, and the current demonstration only creates

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There are some sourcing issues to be sure (which are very easy to fix!) The mathematics section needs better sources, as there are some paragraphs lacking footnotes. But this material is so standard as to be found in tertiary sources like Kline, or Boyer and Merzbach. Perhaps the sections in

2535:. Personally I think the direct quotation is helpful here, since the unquoted version makes it sound like we're paraphrasing a comment talking about focusing reflectors per se, whereas the direct quotation makes it clear that Lucian didn't include any specifics other than crediting "skill" ( 1564:

Archimedes. I know the temptation that adding such cultural references could bring more traffic to the article but I think popular cultural references that are so incidental to the person of Archimedes (such as that of the latest Indiana Jones movie) are better housed elsewhere. --

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We don't know much about the life of Archimedes and everything we do know was written long after his death; the article makes this clear. I'm not sure how "filtering through modern commentary" would help, as he has been dead for over two thousand years. This is a weird argument to

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Anyway... Do you have some specific recommended recent literature that you think should be added here? One thing I'd like to see in particular is some discussion of Archimedes' influence on the mathematics and science of the medieval Islamic world, which is currently unmentioned.

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Yes, "he has been dead for over two thousand years"—exactly! So scholars have had two thousand years to analyze, update and revise his biography! Would you really claim that there are no scholars which have altered, changed, updated, reinterpreted his biography from 2000 year old

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relative to the amount of available material about Archimedes, it would be probably 5x longer than currently – the mathematics section alone would be longer than the current article – and we'd have people complaining that GA/FAs need to be short enough to read in one sitting or

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I do appreciate your effort to keep this brief. Perhaps someone else has an idea how to make a few sentence summary that conveys that there's no contemporaneous evidence about the "heat ray" and 2nd century mentions point to some kind of incendiary (perhaps some precursor to

1709:, and could be used to measure the volume of the crown. The video isn't what Vitruvius said so it is not a direct illustration. I also think that the video could be removed without a great loss. The illustration of the screw in the water is what Vitruvius actually says.-- 500: 1986:

specialist academic libraries or paywalled academic resources, so it is hard for me to know exactly what you want here. We know that many of the things said by the Roman historians are likely to be apocryphal, which is why they are treated with caution.--

1684:: the water exerts an upward force on the object proportional to the displaced volume, and by Newton's Third Law the object exerts an equal and opposite force on the water, pushing the container down. The description of the file explains this correctly. 2331:

The biography's first paragraph does not have primary sources; it includes a source from 1897 (?), a 1975 journal article and a dictionary entry, the latter two being some of the only scholarship in the whole section. The last sentence is

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has a high gloss sheen, but if someone wanted to actually read and verify the cites it would be very difficult. I have tried to stick to easy to follow cites, not what someone said about it on page 336 of an obscure or paywalled academic

2637:. I'm just not sure what that paragraph should say. Maybe we should be leading along the lines of, "As legend has it, Archimedes focused the light of the sun using large mirrors and set Roman ships ablaze at the siege of Syracuse..." – 1496:

meant in all likelihood a wreath. In any case, this is too intricate for a regular reader to know, and your solution (i.e. mentioning the crown was likely a votive wreath) is sensible enough and should suffice for now. Thanks. --

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for the page views of this article, up from an average of around 2,500 a day to over 30,000 on 2 July. It's probably the first time that Archimedes has been a character in a big budget Hollywood movie, and he is played by Nasser

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I agree with your assessment, as there was never an "Archimedes dial" and certainly not one that can travel through time. We do not know who built the Antikythera mechanism either but the evidence collected suggest it was likely

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The "Legacy" section is also very weak. It's hard to overstate the continuing legacy of Archimedes in mathematics: one could go so far as to say that he invented mathematics as we know it. The section doesn't even try.

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is a goldmine for academic sources. You'll see that the further reading section already includes quite a few links to archive.org copies, which are freely available to borrow (sometimes a free registration is needed).

2416:, 2022), edited by Chemla, which involved a paper by Netz, "The place of Archimedes in world history", accompanied by responses from 13 other scholars. Knowledge editors with moderate experience can access these via 2052:

seems to be from specialist academic sources. I don't have easy access to this type of material and people who want to read the sources for themselves would also have this problem. However, I accept your point on

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That illustration is perfect, thanks for finding it! (I did look earlier but couldn't find anything.) I'll go ahead and replace the video with this illustration in a couple of days if there are no objections. --

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a single section, I suspect there are plenty of others. Other examples (from a glance) include the first paragraph of the Heat ray section and the second paragraph of the Astronomical instruments. –

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to include two (usually uncited) sentences. The legacy section is merely a list of length quotes and random trivia; no information on his actual influence into later mathematics is explained.

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Almost the entire biography is exclusively relying on primary sources; please note that these "Rorres, Chris" citations are just a web page with a public domain translation of Greek authors.

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Measurement of volume by displacement, (a) before and (b) after an object has been submerged. The amount by which the liquid rises in the cylinder (∆V) is equal to the volume of the object.

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I propose we leave the section as is for now and let others weigh in before editing any more. It's getting late and I don't want us to inadvertently start the next Great Edit War.

1386:, which is usually translated into English as crown. As Chris Rorres points out, other historical research suggests that the crown would likely have been in the shape of a wreath. 2836: 2020:, we do not interpret primary sources on Knowledge. This is a tertiary encyclopedia that summarizes secondary sources. We don't cite from Roman sources directly, period, and we 2861: 900: 485: 396: 221: 2896: 2751: 1212: 1202: 1750:

was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in April 2022 so it is a relatively new image there. It does fit in with the text of the Vitruvius anecdote a lot better than the video.--

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point out, the mathematics sections and legacy are surprisingly sparse, and the reliance on solely primary sources (or not sources) for large swathes of text is not ideal.

143: 2776: 1882:), which seems to imply that the lead and the body are not matched at all. The lead includes no biographical information, and its structure is very difficult to follow. 1382:: There are not many versions of the story that refer to "Archimedes and the golden wreath"; I've never come across this before. This is because Vitruvius uses the word 2560:

stuff to this, as I keep arguing the discussion better belongs to the Archimedes heat ray entry. Maybe our efforts should divert there if said article is not up to par.

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It would help if someone dug up recent scholarly work that evaluated the traditional tales and checked them for consistency, plausibility, etc. Something like what the

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I appreciate that. Certainly that material is more difficult to access, but nowadays there are more resources for that. GoogleBooks includes extensive previews, and

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The reason why it may read like that is the preceding sentence about Diocles that was not originally there. I'm all for taking Diocles out, rather than add even

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This hasn't been added to the article yet, because the film is not released until 30 June in the USA. It probably will get added, but it runs into problems with

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The biography's third paragraph is only primary sources (save for the line "He also mentions that Marcellus brought to Rome two planetariums Archimedes built")

895:, a group of contributors interested in Knowledge's articles on classics. If you would like to join the WikiProject or learn how to contribute, please see our 2916: 2285:

In any case, there seems to be some confusion. I'm not saying this is a bad article, or even that the sourcing is bad, I'm saying that it does not match the

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Does anyone have the energy to find page numbers in Dijksterhuis, Heath, etc.? Citing these long books without more specifics seems a bit mean to readers. –

1661:. I am proposing to remove this demonstration because it is not related to the corresponding text, and because the explanation in the caption is incorrect: 2781: 2741: 988: 2138:. I don't see a fundamental problem with our reporting "Cicero said..." as long as we have further, modern sources to contextualize that. Nothing in the 2806: 2791: 2756: 605: 79: 2841: 2831: 2736: 809: 276: 1536:, because it is not directly related to Archimedes other than the name, and there is no evidence that Archimedes designed the Antikythera mechanism. 2816: 2746: 2341:

The biography's fourth paragraph is only primary sources, save for the its last line (I checked the Jaeger source and it only covers the last line).

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article for not giving direct pointers to editions/translations of the ancient sources; that's mildly inconvenient! When we say, for example,

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with near-zero density. The container would still lower, even though no mass is "added" (whatever that means). The correct explanation is

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I do agree the article needs a major Enterprise "refit" to keep it FA worthy, just wanted you to know what we might be up against.

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requirement is sourcing showing why something is notable, and the film has very little to do with the actual work of Archimedes.--

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One source people may want to look at with some counterfactual speculation about Archimedes' influence is the recent issue of

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Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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The story told by Vitruvius says only that Archimedes noticed that the water level of the bath rose as he got in, which is

2539:) . I understand that we're trying to keep this brief here and offload details to the (currently mediocre and incomplete) 1858:

Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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content on Knowledge. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the

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This article is deeply below FA standards, and unless immense and extensive improvements are made, it should go to

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Hi there, this is a rather revealing point to harp on, and I highly recommend you take a look at some recent FAs (

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history on Knowledge. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join

214: 2680: 2634: 2540: 2319: 2252: 2171: 1526: 1473: 372: 201: 558: 1525:, Jones goes on a search for the Archimedes Dial, a device capable of time travel. It is based on the 1468:, not the wreath. Diadems began to replace wreaths as symbols of power and victory towards the end of 2121: 1706: 1592: 1533: 2582:

or the like) but by ~600 AD there was apparently an established legend about reflectors and ships. –

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Another possibly useful source relevant to Archimedes' influence is the 2010 conference proceedings

2667: 2641: 2609: 2586: 2547: 2501: 2467: 2451: 2428: 2400: 2196: 55: 2289:. Alas, these are two very different things, and you are all welcome to (rather bizarrely) dig on 1282: