18 ms·
Leonardo da Vinci’s experiments explored gravity as a form of acceleration
- paxys 4y agoMathematicians and physicists in several parts of the world – including Europe – had a pretty solid scientific understanding of gravity and acceleration well before the 1500s, so I'm not sure why this is so notable.
- dukeofdoom 4y agoThis was invented after his time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIjnFIwPmIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIjnFIwPmIE But Gravity powered clock mechanisms existed during Da Vinci's time. I believe.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoA recent discussion on the topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34764318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34764318
- pbj1968 4y agoThis Leonardo is really going places.
- quectophoton 4y agoI have deep respect for these geniuses of the past. Imagine what they could have achieved if they have had access to modern tools, even "just" something like a graphing calculator[1]. [1]: I like https://www.desmos.com/calculator https://www.desmos.com/calculator
- xeonmc 4y agoDesmos? You mean a full-blown Turing-complete simulation platform[0]? [0] https://www.desmos.com/calculator/vjnhlumjiw https://www.desmos.com/calculator/vjnhlumjiw
- anoncow 4y agoThat website is (chef’s kiss) and I don’t understand what it is about.
- ZiiS 4y agoMy worry is giving someone with da Vinci's thirst for knowledge Wikipedia and they may never have time to achieve anything.
- GuB-42 4y agoI actually think the tools and environment are more important that the genius. There are thousands, maybe millions of people with genius-level intellect, all capable of being the next Leonardo or Einstein. Out of them only a small fraction grew up in the right environment, usually wealthy families, but that's still a lot of people. The next, and I think most important requirement are the tool needed to make the discovery, or even just to know that a discovery is to be made. For example, if you don't have the tools needed to notice that the speed of light isn't infinite, special relativity makes no sense. General relativity requires even more tricky measurement, in fact it didn't came long after people noticed something was wrong with Newtonian mechanics. Tools are in the general sense. Physical object like a computer or a good telescope, manufacturing techniques and even maths, think of the "shoulders of giants" thing. So it would be more like giving the graphing calculator the genius it needs rather than going back in time and giving the genius a graphing calculator.
- david927 4y agoNicely said. Alan Kay talks a lot about this.
- rerdavies 4y agoEven better, imagine what he could have achieved if he had access to modern calculus!
- kwhitefoot 4y agoWhat Leonardo needed was staff. He needed to run a research institute and offload the implementation to people who were less easily distracted.
- mo_42 4y agoYes! During his lifetime, he was mainly seen as an artist. He probably earned well but still magnitudes lower than what he would have needed to get something done. Just imagine if there would have been something like venture capitalists. I guess in terms of the big five, he was super-high in openness but no so high in conscientiousness. In today's world he would fit better because he could run an institute or a company.
- rerdavies 4y agoOne of the things that irritates me a little about Da Vinci is he gets disproportionate credit for inventing things that don't actually work. The list of things he invented that he actually got to work is vanishingly small. Even when claims are made that he is "prescient", there has never been, nor will there ever be a functional "helicopter" that looks like Da Vinci's helicopter.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoYou always compare people against their contemporaries. Da Vinci has his reputation because he was exploring ideas far above and beyond his contemporaries, and because his breadth of knowledge and skills covered a wide swathe of subjects.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y agoHis killing machines seemed to work just fine [1], although some seem to go towards a more interesting counterpoint for when HBO will make the inevitable series Da Vinci: The Machine, staring Leonardo di Caprio [2]. [1] How Leonardo da Vinci made a living from killing machines, https://theconversation.com/how-leonardo-da-vinci-made-a-living-from-killing-machines-112402 https://theconversation.com/how-leonardo-da-vinci-made-a-liv... [2] Leonardo’s War Machines – The Italian Genius May Have Deliberately Sabotaged His Own Designs, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/leonardos-war-machines.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/leonardos-war-machi...
- wizzwizz4 4y ago> there has never been, nor will there ever be a functional "helicopter" that looks like Da Vinci's helicopter. No: it has no stabilising rotor. However, there could be a functional quadcopter using four of Da Vinci's aerial screws: https://www.cnet.com/science/this-drone-flies-using-da-vincis-530-year-old-helicopter-design/ https://www.cnet.com/science/this-drone-flies-using-da-vinci...
- n4r9 4y agoI may be missing something here, but there's a conceptual leap from "the acceleration produced by gravitational force" to "gravity as a form of acceleration". Da Vinci certainly appears to be exploring the former. The latter was Einstein's great insight. I don't see much in the article to persuade me that da Vinci was equating gravity and acceleration in the way Einstein did, and so the title seems a little too suggestive.
- red_trumpet 4y agoWell, thinking of gravity as a force is Newtonian mechanics, which was also not available to da Vinci.
- globuous 4y agoWhich was in itself the genius of this newton guy. It’s one thing to realise that objects falling accelerate. It’s another to realise that F=ma, and that this can model objects falling as well as a bunch of other things. Surely da Vinci wasn’t lucky enough to have an apple fall on his head ? :)
- codethief 4y ago> "gravity as a form of acceleration". […] The latter was Einstein's great insight. […] equating gravity and acceleration in the way Einstein did This sounds like a gross misinterpretation of what Einstein said. Einstein's great insight was that gravity defines inertial (i.e. non-accelerated) frames of reference. Put differently, in free fall you are not in an accelerated frame, despite what an outside observer on the surface of Earth might say. This is commonly abbreviated by "All massive bodies follow the same (inertial) trajectories in the presence of gravity, irrespective of their constitution", which is the Equivalence Principle. What you are maybe referring to is what an observer experiences who stands still on the surface of a massive body: They can't free-fall, and so they're not in an inertial frame (= the thing defined by gravity) and thus actually accelerate upwards from the point of view of spacetime.
- n4r9 4y ago
- thefoolofdaath 4y agoIMHO, this is less surprising discovery about him considering this probing is around 300 years ahead of his time, and Da Vinci already has proof for concepts 500 ahead of his time.
- rerdavies 4y agoUmm. But the water droplets/sand particles do NOT form a straight line if you accelerate the jug. You have to decelerate the jug with exactly the right timing to form a straight line, not accelerate it. Nor do the beads in the Caltech video form a straight line, despite their dishonest attempt to arbitrarily impose a straight line on beads that are clearly not in a straight line. In the second diagram, which is alleged to be an attempt to plot acceleration due to gravity to the position of an accelerating water jug, the values [0,1,2,4,8] are marked on the x-axis, and [0,-1,-2,-4,-8] on the y-axis. Da Vinci then plots lines from [0,-8] to the points (0,0),(1,0),(2,0),(4,0),(8,0). Doing so doesn't really establish any sort of relationship between accelerating jugs and acceleration due to gravity, even allowing for an incorrect equation of motion for an accelerating object. Da Vinci spent most of his early career trying to sell military technology to potential patrons (largely if not completely unsuccessfully). One of the pieces of technologies he was trying to sell was a process for calculating improved artillery range tables (tables of elevation vs. range). He didn't manage to sell that either. The second diagram is more easily interpreted as a doodle that makes an unsuccessful attempt to scry a relationship between elevation and range for artillery pieces.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago>But the water droplets/sand particles do NOT form a straight line if you accelerate the jug. You have to decelerate the jug with exactly the right timing to form a straight line, not accelerate it. You can make a right triangle via either acceleration or deceleration at the same rate as gravity. However, you can only make an Isosceles Right Triangle with acceleration Vertical position is a function of t^2. If you have constant horizontal velocity, you get a concave curve like this: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Y%3D-1x%5E2 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Y%3D-1x%5E2 Accelerating the horizontal velocity leads to a triangle like this: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Y%3D-x https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Y%3D-x
- SamBam 4y agoActually a constant horizontal velocity will make a straight vertical line of droplets under the jug. This is because the drops will have the same horizontal velocity as the jug. You can see that here: https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TrajectoryOfABomb/ https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TrajectoryOfABomb/ At any time, the first bomb is always directly under the plane. This means all subsequent bombs will also be under the plane.
- orwin 4y agoDa Vinci's work on water's management and hydrolics ultimately pushed us through the technological wall the Romans hit, that lead toward waterworks and the first industrial revolution.
- credit_guy 4y ago> "What we saw is that Leonardo wrestled with this, but he modeled it as the falling object's distance was proportional to 2 to the t power [with t representing time] instead proportional to t squared," Roh says. "It's wrong, but we later found out that he used this sort of wrong equation in the correct way." In his notes, da Vinci illustrated an object falling for up to four intervals of time—a period through which graphs of both types of equations line up closely. All lines look straight if plotted on a log-scale and drawn with a thick enough marker.
- lanosbdld 4y agoCompare 2^t, where t takes values from [1, 2, 3, 4], with t^2 over the same set of values. The results are closer than you might expect.
- josefresco 4y agoJust finished reading Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. Was a very good read, learned a lot about da Vinci that I was never taught or discovered on my own. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684622-leonardo-da-vinci https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684622-leonardo-da-vin...
- actinium226 4y ago^ I also just finished it. Really loved it. Really loved how Isaacson allowed himself to interject here and there with his own thoughts and his own appreciation of daVinci. I felt like it really highlighted some of the unique aspects of the man. I also came to appreciate some of the artwork and now I can look at the Mona Lisa and have my own thoughts on the work.
- p1mrx 4y agoWould it be correct to say that you feel gravity/weight because the ground is accelerating upwards in your local reference frame, and your body's inertia resists that acceleration?
- hgsgm 4y agoWhen you aren't moving you feel pressure due to you and the planet trying to free fall into each other to make a black hole, or at least pass each other in very close orbit, but being blocked by the repulsion of your electrons vs your shoes'/floor's/ground's. When you are falling, you are feeling the air that is hitting you because it is not falling, causing the electron effect above, and your guts feel weird because your brain is noticing that nothing is pushing on them anymore.
- samstave 4y agoSo... this is a really interesting comment to me. Years ago when I was really into [various philosophies] and [secret society]... They stated that gravity actually pushes up but it is mass and movement that counteract gravity's push it was the vibrations of cymatics and sound that could counter-act mass on gravity and take advantage of gravity pushing up... and this is how the ancients knew to move/manipulate matter in space... This is what Tesla alludes to through 3/6/9 vibrations, and how Ed Skalnanin built the coral castle. Its all about changing harmonious vibrations, and both Skalnanin and the Egyptions had interesting vibratory circular tools which are missing parts, but basincally from spinning them they could manipulate the vibratory frequency of matter such that their mass didnt effect gravity and took advantage of gravity's push... So the idea was to think of mass as the inverse of gravity when the frequencies are not sync'd.. I know it science-fiction, but its fun to think about. I think the more interesting effect to look at is centrifugal forces. I think that everything spins because a constant turning (warping) of space-time (gravity pushing) 'UP' is how mass stays 'co-herent' 'co-hesion' Think of superconductive levitation. Slow the spin of an object "in-motion" and it can levitate... What if rather than through temperature control on manipulating the rotation of Atoms, you could use sound to levitate objects.. (seen the frog levitating in ultra-sound... The conspiracy idea is that it is mapped out in certain stone carvings for the frequency. Like the Rose church, which has Cymatic [atterns carved into its walls, which tell you the frequencies used... Think of how certain alloys are made under magnetic fields, and ceramics. Imaging forging an alloy under both a magnetic field & a cymatic frequency. I love this conspiracy theory as its a great foundation to science-fiction writing as well.
- dboreham 4y agoSpeaking of Leonardo: I noticed that the Mona Lisa has a new much better (more transparent) protection glass, at least new since I last visited a few years ago. It makes it imho more worthwhile to go see it. Also pro tip, go in February -- there's only a moderate crowd, not a crazy dense throng as in the summer.
- actinium226 4y agoHere's another pro-tip: there are other "copies" of the Mona Lisa which, IMHO, are more interesting to look at than the deeply varnished one on display at the Louvre. The Prado Mona Lisa is one I particularly like.
- olddustytrail 4y agoInevitable pedantry: his name is Leonardo, not "da Vinci". "da" means "from", or in this sense "of". So just as you might say "Jesus of Nazareth" you say "Leonardo of Vinci". You would never say something like "...and Of Nazareth said...", so likewise it's weird to say "da Vinci invented..."
- alecst 4y agoI asked an Italian native speaker about this and she said she calls him “da Vinci.” She has a PhD in linguistics, and in general she’s pretty precise with her language. She doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with it. Just as a datapoint.
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- dokem 4y agoYou’re wrong because everyone in the English speaking world refers to him as da Vinci which means da Vinci is the name that refers to the person Leonardo. That’s how names and language work. Now back to playing with my LEGOs.
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- electroagenda 4y agoDomingo de Soto (1494-1560) also indicated that gravity produced accelerarion way earlier than Galileo Galilei.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI would think that individuals from antiquity would understand that an object rolling down hill picks up speed, or a rock dropped from higher hits harder. The existence of acceleration aspect may not have been novel, but measuring the rate seems to be the novel part
- tbarbugli 4y agoisn't indeed easier to measure a rolling object going down from a ramp? measuring water falling from a jar while moving the jar sounds very complicated.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoThat's true, but a ball rolling down hill wouldn't give you an estimate of gravity without understanding Newtonian physics and friction coefficients