Leonardo Da Vinci understood the nature of gravity more than a century before Newton
Caltech engineers studied Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and found that the polymath's understanding of gravity was far ahead of its time.
In fact, he had even conducted experiments to show that gravity is a form of acceleration and had modeled the gravitational constant with about 97 percent accuracy, according to Phys.org. Da Vinci could have been more precise in his findings, but he was limited by the tools at his disposal.
Engineers from Caltech found that Leonardo da Vinci's understanding of gravity was centuries ahead of his time. He had devised experiments to demonstrate that gravity is a form of acceleration & he modeled the gravitational constant to around 97% accuracy https://t.co/Oty2NySTMF pic.twitter.com/d67bFbvyCu
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) February 14, 2023
Da Vinci's advanced discoveries were rediscovered in early 2017 by Mory Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann professor of aeronautics and medical engineering, in the Codex Arundel, a collection of documents written by da Vinci covering a variety of topics both scientific and personal Gharib noticed a series of sketches showing triangles generated by sand-like particles pouring out of a vase.
“What struck me was when he wrote 'Equation of Moti' on the hypotenuse of one of his drawn triangles, what was an isosceles right triangle,” said Gharib, lead author of the Leonardo article. “I was interested in understanding what Leonardo meant by that phrase”.
Gharib enlisted the help of colleagues Chris Roh, then a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and now an assistant professor at Cornell University, and Flavio Noca of the Western Switzerland University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Geneva. In the papers, da Vinci detailed an experiment with a jug of water that sought to explain the acceleration of gravity mathematically. So Leonardo had the great intuition of seeing the force of gravity as an acceleration, but was wrong in identifying its constant.
By making a model of the calculations and drawings the scientists
“What we saw is that Leonardo struggled with this problem, but modeled it as if the distance of the falling object were proportional to 2 to the power of t [with t representing time] rather than proportional to t squared” Roh said. "He's wrong, but we later found out that he used this sort of wrong equation in the correct way." In his notes, da Vinci illustrated an object falling for up to four time intervals, a period over which the graphs of both types of equations aligned closely. In short, he did not have the scientific tools to distinguish between the two equations.
“We don't know whether da Vinci did any further experiments or investigated this matter,” Gharib told Phys.org. "But the fact that he approached the problem in this way – in the early 1500s – shows how far his thinking was."
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The article Leonardo Da Vinci understood the nature of the force of gravity more than a century before Newton comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/leonardo-da-vinci-comprese-la-natura-della-forza-di-gravita-con-piu-di-un-secolo-di-anticipo-rispetto-a-newton/ on Tue, 14 Feb 2023 20:41:12 +0000.