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Note: Eureka!
Tag(s): Galileo
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Archimedes was a revelation. Throughout the rest of his life, Galileo's admiration for Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, engineer and scientist of the third century BC, knew no bounds. ‘It is all too obvious that no one else has ever been nearly as clever as he was.’1
LOCATION: 671

The threads, if they have been wound properly around the arm, are too fine and too close together to be counted by eye. You count them by running a very sharp knife gently and slowly (‘adagio, adagio’) across them. You can then both hear and feel the number of threads that pass under the knife's blade. Galileo has thus achieved a new precision in measuring the difference between two weights.
LOCATION: 709