how do ships float?
In: Physics
Archimedes’ principle says that the buoyant force acting on a submerged object equals the weight of the fluid it displaces.
That is, for a ship to float, it has to weigh less than a ship-sized volume of water.
And a ship-sized volume of water is *very* heavy. Steel is also heavy, true, and a solid chunk of steel would be heavier than that volume of water, but ships aren’t solid chunks of steel. They have lots of empty space inside, which takes up space (-> more buoyant force) without adding much more weight.
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