Pascal and Archimedes

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, etc. He came up with, what we now call, Pascal's Principle: Pressure is transmitted undiminished in a fluid. Basically, this means that if you push on a fluid, that push is felt everywhere in the fluid. This can be demonstrated quite easily with The Blob.

Archimedes came around significantly earlier than Pascal (287 BCE - 212 BCE) but was a similarly accomplished mathematician, physicist, philosopher, etc. He came up with what we now call Archimedes Principle: The buoyant force on a body immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced. Here is a short Ted Ed video describing how Archimedes got started working on this principle. In FACT his method could be extremely useful for you in trying to measure volume for your A assignment.