The stories of the murals – The Rubicon

The stories of the murals

Archimedes' bath

The Greek mathematician and physicist, Archimedes, was given a task by the tyrant Hiero II of Syracuse to find out if his crown was truly made of pure gold. After mulling over his task, Archimedes decided to take a break by taking a bath. He weighed the crown and gold coins in the water. He observed that the items moved different volumes of water...
Archimedes' eureka

...the crown was, in fact, made of less vauable gold. Archimedes jumped out of his bath upon his discovery and shouted, "Eureka!" A fun fact from the plaque suggests that Jerome Hill modeled Archimedes after Fredrick Fiske, a math professor.
Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Piza

Italian polymath Galileo Galilei is said to have dropped objects of varying masses from atop the Leaning Tower of Piza to prove that all objects, regardless of mass, fall with the same acceleration.
Galileo's spectators

A crowd gathered around the tower to witness this experiement.
Toricelli's Experiment

On the left of Galileo's discovery is his student, Evangelista Toricelli. This painting depicts Toricelli's invention of the barometer, a tool used to measure atmospheric pressure.
Newton's apple tree

As the story goes, when an apple fell on Newton's head, he wondered why that happened. This story about Issac Newton's discovery of universal gravitation is arguably one of the most popular stories of science today.
(Lani Ngonethong)

Franklin's Kite

The American polymath and founding father of the U.S., Benjamin Franklin, crafted a simple kit and added a wire at the top to act as a lightning rod. He flew it up to a storming sky to demonstrate that lightning is a form of electricity.
The Madgeburg hemispheres

The Madgeburg hemispheres were two halves of a sphere with mating rings used in a 1654 experiment. When the air is oumped out of the sealed sphere, it creates a vacuum. Attatched to each half were horses that struggled to pull the hemispheres apart, demonstarting the power of atmoshperic pressure.
Einstein's equation

After the cabinets were removed during renovation, Jerome Hill painted this mural of Albert Einstein and his dog in 1964. Einstein sits at his desk, looking out the window. Above him is the equation for mass-energy equivalence E=mc².

Stories Using This Infobox

The mural room: where science, history and art meet