From the Australian Telegraph.
Excerpt:
The students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester who came to this conclusion used the dimensions for the boat that were given in the Bible.
In the book of Genesis, Noah is commanded to build an ark which is 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high to house himself, his family and two of every species of animal.
For the study, the students settled on a cubit being 48.2cm long and found the ark could support the weight of 2.5 million sheep. The university said that previous research suggested there were approximately 35,000 species of animals in Noah’s time.
The students said it was not clear if all the animals would actually be able to fit on board. But if they did, the boat would still float.
Student Thomas Morris, 22, said: “You don’t think of the Bible necessarily as a scientifically accurate source of information, so I guess we were quite surprised when we discovered it would work. We’re not proving that it’s true, but the concept would definitely work.”
The full paper, The animals float two by two, hurrah!, was published in a peer-reviewed student journal.
Research lead Oliver Youle, 22, explained the science behind the study.
“Every object when immersed in a liquid has an upwards force acting against it — a buoyancy force; it also has a weight acting downwards — a downwards force, and in order for it to float, these two forces need to be equal.”
His colleague Benjamin Jordan added: “Using the dimensions of the ark and the density of the water, we were able to calculate its buoyancy force, which, according to Archimedes’ principle, is equal to the weight of the volume of fluid the object displaces. This meant we were then able to estimate the total mass the ark could support before the gravitational weight would overcome the buoyancy force, causing the ark to sink, which we calculated as 50.54x106kg.”
Good news for us who accept the flood story as historical, and I do. And it’s nice to see scientists taking a look at these things in the Bible to see if they are true. Most people these days seem to sort of assume that everything in the Bible is just figurative metaphors. Well, sometimes the genre is not historical… and sometimes it is. It depends on the book. One thing is for sure – if the Bible is not true, then it’s of no value. The point of it is not to read it for comfort or community. The purpose of it is to tell us who God is and what he’s done.
Please don’t get into a young-Earth vs Old-Earth dispute in the comments.