Buoyant Forces Uncovers a Crime: A Case Report

It's an old saying that “dead men tell no tales” which means that dead people will not betray any secrets. However in this case, the secret could not be held in the depths of water and criminal intent lost battle to the laws of physics. Archimedes’ principle, the physical law of buoyancy, discovered by the ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes, states that a body completely or partially submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body. The buoyant force on a body floating in a liquid or gas is also equivalent in magnitude to the weight of the floating object and is opposite in direction; the object neither rises nor sinks. This long found principle found application in Forensics in the context of flotation of dead bodies after submersion in water bodies which led to revelation of crime.