• froh42@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    If you fully submerge an object, you displace its VOLUME of water. It will always be the same amount (imagine a bowling ball and a soccer ball). You might need to push it.

    When you relate that to its weight, you get the density.

    Imagine you have two 1kg lumps of steel. Out of one you make a bowl with thin walls the out of the other a metal ball. Afterwards they still have (about) the same weight, volume and density - as it’s still steel.

    But put the bowl onto the basin and with a little luck it will float like a boat *, put in the steel ball it will sink.

    But when you put in the bowl sideways without splashing it will displace about the same amount of water than the ball. And it will still weigh 1kg.

    *= The thing with floating people remember from school: The floating bowl will displace as much water as it weighs - that’s the thing Archimedes found out. So our 1kg bowl will displace 1kg of water - which is incidentally about 1 liter, because the density of water is about 1kg/l (it was intentionally defined that way, some guys in the French revolution used water to define mass by volume)