Despite limited tools, Leonardo da Vinci displayed ingenious problemsolving. In their new paper, Caltech Professor Mory Gharib and colleagues examined a combination of da Vinci’s thought and physical experiments regarding the acceleration of falling objects.
Leonardo da Vinci, who lived from 1452 to 1519, was well ahead of the curve in exploring the concept of gravity.
It wasn’t until 1604 that Galileo Galilei would theorize that the distance covered by a falling object was proportional to the square of time elapsed and not until the late 17th century that Sir Isaac Newton would expand on that to develop a law of universal gravitation, describing how objects are attracted to one another.
Da Vinci’s primary hurdle was being limited by the tools at his disposal. For example, he lacked a means of precisely measuring time as objects fell.
His experiments were first spotted by Professor Gharib in the Codex Arundel, a collection of papers written by da Vinci that cover science, art, and personal topics.
In early 2017, Professor Gharib was exploring da Vinci’s techniques of flow visualization to discuss with students he was teaching in a graduate course when he noticed a series of sketches showing triangles generated by sand-like particles pouring out from a jar in the Codex Arundel.
“What caught my eye was when he wrote ‘Equatione di Moti’ on the hypotenuse of one of his sketched triangles — the one that was an isosceles right triangle. I became interested to see what Leonardo meant by that phrase,” Professor Gharib said.
In his papers, da Vinci described an experiment in which a water pitcher would be moved along a straight path parallel to the ground, dumping out either water or a granular material — most likely sand — along the way.
His notes make it clear that he was aware that the water or sand would not fall at a constant velocity but rather would accelerate — also that the material stops accelerating horizontally, as it is no longer…
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