Topic summary
Buoyant force
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Buoyancy.
Forces and equilibrium
Though the above derivation of Archimedes principle is correct, a paper by the Brazilian physicist Fabio M. S. Lima in 2012 proposed a more general approach for the evaluation of the buoyant force exerted by any fluid (even non-homogeneous) on a body with arbitrary shape based on the surface integral of the pressure force applied by the fluid over the entire body's surface. This method leads to the prediction that the buoyant force exerted on a rectangular block touching the bottom of a container points downward, which has been confirmed experimentally.