Researchers at Caltech have recreated an experiment on gravity and acceleration that Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebook.
caltech
Caltech engineer Mory Gharib was going through Leonardo da Vinci’s digitized notebooks one day, looking for flow visualization sketches to share with his graduate students for inspiration. rice field. Then he noticed a small sketch of some triangles. Its geometry seemed to be determined by the grains of sand poured from the jar. Further investigation revealed that Leonardo was trying to study the nature of gravity. The small triangle was long before Isaac Newton came up with the laws of motion, and Albert Einstein in his equivalence principle with his general theory of relativity. [Edited for clarity.] Gharib was even able to reproduce the latest version of the experiment.
Garib and his collaborators describe their findings in a new paper published in the Leonardo Journal, in which modern calculations show that Leonardo’s model produces values for the gravitational constant (G) with about 97% accuracy. I pointed out that What makes this discovery even more amazing is that Leonardo did all this without a means of accurate timekeeping and without the benefit of calculus, which Newton invented in the 1660s to develop the laws of motion and gravitation. is.
“I don’t know if [Leonardo] Ghalib has conducted further experiments and explored this issue in greater depth.”
Leonardo was born in 1452, the illegitimate son of Ser Piero D’Antonio, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, the daughter of a local peasant. Caterina was forced to work as a cowherd in her neighboring village, and Ser Piero married into a wealthy family. But he did not abandon his son. Leonardo grew up in his father’s house and received a solid education, and when his artistic talents blossomed, he apprenticed himself to the famous Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio. In Andrea’s workshop, Leonardo learned the basics of painting and sculpture, grinding and mixing pigments, and perspective geometry. By the time he was accepted into the painters’ guild in 1472, he had already made sketches of pumps, weapons, and ingenious devices of his own design, in addition to his own art.
public domain
Leonardo created over 13,000 pages of notebooks (later compiled into manuscripts), less than a third of which have survived. The notebook contains all kinds of inventions that foreshadow future technologies. Flying machines, bicycles, cranes, missiles, machine guns, “unsinkable” double-hulled ships, dredgers for clearing harbors and canals, floating footwear similar to snowshoes, etc. can move people. walking on water.
Leonardo foresaw the possibility of building his telescope Codex Atlanticus (1490) When he wrote, “Making spectacles for a magnified view of the moon,” it was a century before the invention of musical instruments. And in 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Italian Museum of Ideals, while flipping through Leonardo’s notes, came across a recipe for a mysterious mixture. It produced a mixture that hardened into a material that eerily resembled Bakelite, a synthetic plastic that had been around for a long time. Therefore, Leonardo may have invented the first artificial plastic.
The notebook also contains detailed notes on Leonardo’s extensive anatomical research. The artist occasionally obtained permission from the local hospital to dissect human corpses and studied about 30 corpses during his lifetime. The sketches he observed were mostly very accurate. Most notably, William Harvey illustrated the human heart with a diagram of how heart valves can reduce blood flow 150 years before he unraveled the basics of the human circulatory system. That’s what the description captures.
