A Spring, Hooke's Law, and Archimedes' Principle

A mass on a spring is a simple and inexpensive device that can be used to demonstrate many important physics concepts. Almost all standard introductory physics lab manuals include at least one or two experiments with a spring.1,2 Most of these experiments explore Hooke's law and simple harmonic motion. We would like to suggest another simple “spring-based” experiment that we performed for the past two years in an introductory physics lab at Barry University.