Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered that Leonardo da Vinci’s understanding of gravity is centuries ahead of his time.
In a paper published in the journal Leonardo, the team looked at one of Vinci’s notebooks and found that the famous scientist devised experiments to prove gravity was a form of acceleration. He even modeled the gravity constant with an accuracy of about 97%, Phys.org reported on Feb. 13.
Notes of Leonardo da Vinci’s gravity experiments. (Photo: British Museum)
Da Vinci who lived from 1452 to 1519 went far in exploring this concept. It was not until 1604 that Galileo Galilei hypothesized that the distance traveled by a free-falling body was proportional to the square of time. In the late 17th century, Isaac Newton developed the law of universal gravitation, which describes how objects attract each other. The main obstacle for Vinci was the limitation of the tool. For example, he did not have the equipment to accurately measure the time an object took to fall.
Vinci’s experiment was first discovered by Mory Gharib, a professor of aeronautics and medical engineering, in the Codex Arundel, Vinci’s collection of notes on science, art, and personal subjects. In early 2017, while researching Da Vinci’s line rendering technique to discuss with graduate students, Gharib noticed a series of manuscripts depicting triangles created by seeds of sand poured from jars.
To analyze the notes, Gharib worked with colleagues Chris Roh, an associate professor at Cornell University, and Flavio Noca at the Western Swiss University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Geneva. Noca provides translations of da Vinci’s Italian notes. In his notes, Da Vinci describes an experiment that moves a water jug in a straight line parallel to the ground, pouring water or granular material (most likely sand) in the process. He found that water or sand would not fall at a constant velocity. Instead, they will speed up. Since it is unaffected by the container, the material stops accelerating horizontally and the direction of acceleration points downwards due to gravity.
If the container moves at a constant speed, the line formed by the falling material will be vertical and no triangle will be created. If the container accelerates uniformly, the line formed by the falling material collection will be diagonally slanted, forming a triangle. Da Vinci showed that if the vessel accelerated at the same span as the falling material accelerated by gravity, it would create an equilateral triangle.
Da Vinci tried to describe the acceleration but failed. Using a computer model to perform Da Vinci’s water bottle experiment, the team discovered the mistake he made. “We found that Da Vinci modeled that the distance of the falling object was proportional to time to a power of 2 rather than the square of time ,” Roh said.
