This is a great premise for a hard-SF short story, most probably someone has written one along these lines. I'd say, forget Newton or Maxwell, whose mathematic

This is a great premise for a hard-SF short story, most probably someone has written one along these lines. I'd say, forget Newton or Maxwell, whose mathematical and physics prowess would be hard to beat but imagine the same scenario with Archimedes: finding the ratio of volumes of a sphere in a cylinder? No problem.