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Leonardo da Vinci’s pencil sketches in the early 16th century suggest that he understood gravity long before the English mathematician Isaac Newton, who is credited with the discovery in the late 17th century.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology reanalyzed da Vinci’s notebooks and found the famous experiments devised by the Italians to show that gravity is a form of acceleration.
And he modeled the gravitational constant with an accuracy of 97 percent.
The team believes that the only thing that prevented da Vinci’s experiments from definitively explaining gravity was the limited tools at his disposal: he lacked a means of accurately measuring the time as objects fell.
The sketches show experiments to show that gravity is a form of acceleration. And Leonardo da Vinci modeled the gravitational constant with an accuracy of about 97 percent.
Da Vinci, who lived between 1452 and 1519, was way ahead of the curve in exploring these concepts, so it may not come as a surprise that the famous polymath understood the idea of gravity.
However, it was not until 1604 that Galileo Galilei suggested that the distance traveled by a falling object was proportional to the square of the elapsed time.
And then, in the late 17th century, Newton expanded on that to develop a universal law of gravitation, which describes how objects are attracted to one another.
The story goes that the apple fell on Newton’s head while he was sitting under the tree.
He then had a ‘eureka’ moment in which he developed his theory of gravity after watching fruit fall in the summer of 1666.
Newton theorized that if an apple falls from a tree, gravity can extend further, possibly into space.
Mory Gharib first saw da Vinci’s experiments in Codex Arundel, a collection of articles written by da Vinci covering science, art, and personal topics.
“What struck me was when he wrote ‘Equatione di Moti’ on the hypotenuse of one of his sketched triangles, the one that was an isosceles right triangle,” Gharib, the paper’s lead author, said in a statement.
I was interested to see what Leonardo meant by that phrase.
Leonardo d Vinci was way ahead of the curve in exploring these concepts, so it may not come as a surprise that the famous polymath understood the idea of gravity. Recent work suggests that da Vinci understood gravity long before Isaac Newton (right), who is credited with the discovery.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology reanalyzed da Vinci’s notebooks
The sketches show a water pitcher moving along a straight line parallel to the ground, pouring out water or sand.
Da Vinci’s notes make it clear that when dumped, the contents would not fall at a constant rate but would speed up.
He also wrote that the contents would stop accelerating horizontally because the jar was no longer influencing them: “the acceleration is purely downward due to gravity,” according to the researchers.
“If the jar is moving at a constant velocity, the line created by the falling material is vertical, so a triangle is not formed,” the researchers continued.
If the launcher accelerates at a constant rate, the line created by the accumulation of falling material forms a straight but inclined line, which then forms a triangle.
Da Vinci tried to mathematically describe that acceleration, which is seen in the sketches, but he missed the mark.
The researchers used computer models to run their water vase experiment and figured out where da Vinci went wrong.
“And, as da Vinci pointed out in a key diagram, if the launcher’s motion is accelerated at the same rate as gravity accelerates the falling material, an equilateral triangle is created.”
This is what Gharib initially noted that da Vinci had highlighted with the note ‘Equatione di Moti’ or ‘equalization (equivalence) of movements’.
Da Vinci tried to mathematically describe that acceleration, which is seen in the sketches, but he missed the mark.
The researchers used computer models to run their water vase experiment and found where da Vinci went wrong.
Chris Roh, who was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech at the time of the research, said: “What we saw is that Leonardo struggled with this, but he modeled it as the distance of the falling object being proportional to 2 to the power of t.” . [with t representing time] instead proportional to t squared.’
“It’s wrong, but we later found out that he used this kind of wrong equation in the right way.” In his notes, da Vinci illustrated an object falling for up to four time intervals, a period during which the graphs of both types of equations line up closely.
“We don’t know if da Vinci did more experiments or investigated this question more deeply,” says Gharib. “But the fact that he was dealing with this problem in this way, in the early 16th century, shows how advanced his thinking was.”