Time.news – Artist but also a man of science. When Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t painting or imagining flying machines “he was reflecting on the mysteries of gravity”, writes the New York Times, which recounts how it was discovered that Leonardo did detailed experiments to shed light on the law of gravity “one century before Galileo and about two centuries before Newton”.
A new study on his original ideas and his gravitational experiments was in fact published at the beginning of the month in the homonymous magazine “Leonardo”, which highlights how he was “a man determined to find an iron law of nature to shed light on the overall dynamics of falling objects”. Says in this regard Z. Jane Wang, professor of physics at Cornell University, who has studied some of the pioneering analyzes of da Vinciwho “is not enough” to define as a multifaceted artist because if anything he was “the quintessence” of the Renaissance and “reveled in the rebirth not only of art and literature, but also of science and explorations”.
A modern thinker
Professor Morteza Gharib, professor of aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology and author of the new studies on Leonardo, which make him a modern thinker far ahead of his time, tells us that he learned of his experiments on gravity “while examining an online version of the Arundel”, named after the British collector Earl of Arundel, who had acquired it in the early 17th century. Da Vinci “deciphered hundreds of papers between 1478 and 1518, between the ages of 26 and 66, the year before his death. The documents are now in the British Library.” The collection features his famous reverse, mirror-readable writing, as well as diagrams, drawings and texts covering a wide range of subjects in art and science.
However, what has caught Gharib’s attention is what he himself calls “a mysterious triangle” at the top of page 143, whose originality lies in the way Leonardo’s sketch “shows a jug which, pouring from its spout, produces a series of circles which formed the hypotenuse of the triangle”. Thus Gharib used a program computer to flip the triangle and the writing backwards and “suddenly, the static image came to life. I could see its movement,” exults Gharib on his discovery.
In this regard, he notes in the newspaper: “The effects of gravity are generally seen as the fall of something downwards, whether it is a ball or Newton’s apple”, but observing Leonardo’s drawing, Dr Gharib realized of having managed to split the effects of gravity into two parts which revealed an aspect of nature normally kept hidden”: the first was to observe the natural downward thrust, the second when whoever was holding the jug moved it along the trajectory pouring sand or something else”.
In the drawing, Leonardo notes where the pitcher’s movement started with the letter A, and to show the falling material he adds a series of vertical lines that descend from the upper line of the triangle while the series lengthens as the pitcher moves away more and more from the starting point. “Increasing lengths defined the hypotenuse,” which transformed the hidden nature of gravity “into visible progressions.”