From Mark's article - “Make a float out a length of half-inch balsa dowel. Two inches is enough. Put an antenna into each end about two inches long. Make one out of a steel nail with the head cut off and the other out of a piece of cane that is the exact same diameter as the nail. …… You will find that when the float is shotted so that about one inch of antenna is showing that an additional number 6 shot will submerge the same amount of antenna no matter which way up the float is attached to the line.”
Well let’s try this and first of all get rid of the material that will be counter balanced by all the rest of the shot first, the length of half inch balsa dowel. In proportion to the tip this may have a factor of 50 to 1 (and this is where your Achimedes theory falls apart, perhaps) and would need perhaps two swan shot just to sink that. Let’s just try with the tips.
I don’t have any peacock quill, the lightest and most buoyant of all, in the diameter required, but we have got cane, sarcandas reed, some fluorescent plastic tips and some nails. To each of which I have superglued a short length of 1 lbs nylon monofilament. I place each one in a vase of water –
The sarcandas reed floats
The cane floats
The plastic sinks slowly to the bottom
The nail sinks like a brick
Based on the above, the latter two must be out of contention for a start, but the plastic one when added to a peacock quill as an insert would be highly sensitive requiring (I would guess) less pulling effort by the fish since it has less than neutral buoyancy anyway.
I then added a no. 8 shot to the sarcandas reed and it cocked slightly, and when I added the same to the cane, it sank fully. The effects, I believe, are that little effort by the fish would be required to pull the cane stem under (equal to is it 0.06 gram making it slightly more sensitive than the sarcandas reed which would require more effort (= 3or more x no8 shot) to pull it under.
Q.E.D.
In short, Archimedes was not an angler and never fished with peacock quills or plastic stemmed insert floats so what the hell would he know? I fall short of calling him a complete idiot as he did, after all, develop the ‘Screw’ without which Sunday mornings would be so boring until the papers arrived. Good old Archimedes.
In other words Mark, I don’t reckon too much to your ‘scientific’ theory either.
:wh
I know, I should be finding better things to do on a Saturday morning, but it's miserable out.