3 ms·

Amazing that someone 500 years ago was both interested in and had the analytical skills to propose a rule we are still trying to understand today.

• Tor3 8y ago
  .. and that "Someone" was nearly always the same guy: Leonardo da Vinci. He must have been maybe the most curious man ever.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • jacobolus 8y ago
    A few notes: * 500 years ago there hadn’t been intensive centuries-long studies of many of these phenomena, so if you wanted to know something about it the only way was to do independent investigation. * Even for subjects which had been studied, books were rare/expensive, poorly indexed, often contained a mishmash of disorganized material, hard to track down, and often flagrantly wrong but remaining uncorrected for centuries. * Leonardo was notoriously bad at sticking with any project, from his childhood on, easily abandoning his work and jumping to another topic, including leaving many of his paid projects unfinished. Probably serious ADHD. * There have been many intensely curious polymaths, but in many cases they didn’t take proper notes, the notes were lost/destroyed, the notes are buried in an archive somewhere where nobody reads about them, ...