According to a report in early April, it has been demonstrated that the design of Noah’s Ark was just right for the job.
A group of Master’s students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Leicester University studied the exact dimensions of the ark as set out in Genesis 6.13-22. They are confident that it would have handled the weight of 70,000 animals without sinking.
God instructed Noah to use gopher wood to build a boat that was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. By taking the average of the Egyptian and Hebrew cubit as 18.98 inches, the ark would have been 472 ft long.
Archimedes
Using these dimensions, the Archimedes principle of buoyancy and the approximate weight of the 35,000 species of animal that previous research has suggested would have been saved, the students were surprised to discover that the ark could have floated.
One of the students explained: ‘Using the dimensions of the ark and the density of the water, we were able to calculate its buoyancy force, which is equal to the weight of the volume of fluid the object displaces. This meant we were able to estimate the total mass the ark could support before the gravitational weight would overcome the buoyancy force’.
Another student on the team commented on their findings: ‘You don’t think of the Bible as a scientifically accurate source of information, so I guess we were quite surprised when we discovered it would work’.
