A recent study says that Italian genius and renowned artist Leonardo da Vinci examined the ‘attraction of one item to another’ to dissect gravity two centuries before Isaac Newton and a century before physicist Galileo Galilei. According to the findings of their investigation, scientists at the California Institute of Technology found that Leonardo conducted extensive experiments to shed light on the physics of gravity.
Morteza Gharib, a professor of aeronautics at California Institute of Technology and one of the study’s authors, claimed in an interview about the investigation published this month in the journal ‘Leonardo’ that ‘nothing could stop him.’ ‘He was thinking a long way in advance. It was unable to postpone till later.’
Leonardo has long been famous for his versatile contribution to humanity as an artist, which also includes sketches of flying machines and fighting vehicles. He also made advances in geology, optics, anatomy and engineering.
The Codex Arundel, which has the name of a British collector, the Earl of Arundel, who bought it at the beginning of the 17th century, was examined by Morteza Gharib, who claimed to have discovered Leonardo’s studies on gravity while doing so.
Leonardo left behind more than 7,200 pages of notes and scribbles, according to da Vinci historian Walter Isaacson. Until a year before his death in 1519, Da Vinci wrote a compilation of hundreds of manuscripts between 1478 and 1518. The British Library is where the papers are kept. His well-known mirror writing is included in the collection, along with writings, diagrams, and drawings on a variety of art and science-related subjects.
‘A mysterious triangle’, as Gharib called it, caught the attention of the scientists. It reportedly showed an adjoining pitcher and, pouring from its spout, a series of circles that formed the triangle’s hypotenuse. Gharib used a computer program to flip the triangle and the adjacent areas of backward writing.
The static image was then brought to life. ‘I could see motion,’ Gharib recalled in the interview. ‘I could see him pouring stuff out.’
The pitcher experiment, Gharib said, established that gravity was a constant force that led to the falling of pitcher’s contents with an increasing pace. Leonardo illustrated the gain as the pitcher’s contents falling lower and lower over time while succeeding in deconstructing the gravity.
Gharib said that da Vinci was able to calculate the gravitational constant to an accuracy within 10 per cent of the modern value.
‘It’s mind boggling,’ Gharib said. ‘That’s the beauty of what Leonardo does.’
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