A doodle reveals da Vinci’s early deconstruction of gravity

By William J. Broad

When Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t painting a masterpiece or dreaming up flying machines, he was pondering the mysteries of gravity. The Renaissance thinker considered himself as much a man of science as an artist and spent untold hours exploring how the “attraction of one object to another” could affect such things as the flight of birds and the fall of water.

Now, scientists have discovered that Leonardo did detailed experiments that sought to illuminate the nature of gravity a century before Galileo and some two centuries ahead of Newton’s making its investigation an exact science. The scientists’ study of his gravitational ideas and experimentation was published earlier this month in the journal “Leonardo.”

“Nothing could stop him,” Morteza Gharib, an author of the paper and a professor of aeronautics at California Institute of Technology, said in an interview. “He was far ahead in his thinking. It could not wait for the future.”

Z. Jane Wang, a professor of physics at Cornell University who has studied some of da Vinci’s pioneering analyses but was not involved in the current paper, said the new study revealed a man determined to find an iron law of nature that would shed light on the overall dynamics of falling objects.

“It’s not enough” to call the polymath an artist, Dr. Wang said. More accurately, she added, he was “a quintessential” man of the Renaissance, which gloried in the revival of not only art and literature but also science and explorations of nature.

Leonardo has long been famous for his technical ingenuity and versatility, for his sketches of flying machines and fighting vehicles. He also made advances in geology, optics, anatomy, engineering and hydrodynamics, the arm of science that explores the behavior of fluids.

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of da Vinci, reports that as a close observer of nature, he gave much attention to how birds shift their center of gravity as they twist, turn and maneuver in the wind. He also said that Leonardo realized that gravitational attraction kept the seas from falling off the earth.

Dr. Gharib said he learned of Leonardo’s gravity experiments while examining an online version of The Codex Arundel, named after a British collector, the Earl of Arundel, who acquired it early in the 17th century. Da Vinci composed the collection of hundreds of papers between 1478 and 1518 — that is, between the ages of 26 and 66 — the year before his death. The papers now reside in the British Library. The collection features his famous mirror-writing as well as diagrams, drawings and texts covering a range of topics in art and science.

What caught Dr. Gharib’s eye is what he calls “a mysterious triangle” near the top of Page 143. Its strangeness lay in how Leonardo’s sketch showed an adjoining pitcher and, pouring from its spout, a series of circles that formed the triangle’s hypotenuse. Dr. Gharib used a computer program to flip the triangle and the adjacent areas of backward writing.

Suddenly, the static image seemed to come to life. “I could see motion,” Dr. Gharib recalled. “I could see him pouring stuff out.” It was a eureka moment that unveiled Leonardo’s precocious experiment.

Broad is a journalist with NYT©2023

The New York Times