Legal Question in Investment Law in California

Re: ''Sculpture Question''

Do you remember Archimedes and the expression ''Eureka!'' when he sat down in his bathtub and it overflowed?

As I remember this bit of history, or fable, the King had given Archimedes the job of determining the amount of gold in gifts given the King. Since they were irregular in shape, they could be weighed but not measured, and thus their volume might include a lot of base metal. Archimedes realized that his full bathtub overflowed by a volume of water exactly equal to the volume of his submerged body.

So, by weighing the sculpture, you can determine its mass, and by submerging it in a brim-full vessel of water and catching all the overflow (displaced water), you can determine the volume of the sculpture. Then it is easy to do a relatively accurate calculation of the specific gravity of the materials composing the sculpture. If it differs greatly from that of sterling, you know there's a significant amount of alloy or the silver is plated over another metal of dissimilar specific gravity.

This is not, strictly speaking, the ''Archimedes' Principle,'' which has to do with buoyancy (why steel or concrete ships float), but is a related concept (submerged articles displace water equal to their own volume, or almost).