As Archimedes famously observed, if you put an object on a lever arm, it will exert a twisting force around the lever's fulcrum. This twisting is called torque and is equal to the object's weight multiplied by its distance from the fulcrum (the angle of the lever also comes in, but that does not concern us here). If the object is to the left of the fulcrum, the direction of the torque is counterclockwise; if the object is to the right, the direction is clockwise. To compute the torque around a support, simply sum all the torques of the individual objects on the lever.As Archimedes famously observed,
