[HN Gopher] Leonardo noted link between gravity and acceleration...
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Leonardo noted link between gravity and acceleration centuries
before Einstein
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 96 points
Date : 2023-02-12 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| swayvil wrote:
| By "link" they mean "it looks similar".
|
| This has been noted since the first goatherd swung a bucket of
| milk. Right?
| technocratius wrote:
| Great article, thanks for sharing.
|
| This was also interesting to read:
|
| 'One of the sketches showed an isosceles right triangle with
| "Equatione di Moti" written along the hypotenuse. Gharib was
| curious about the meaning of the phrase, but it was in old
| Italian and also written backward in Leonardo's trademark "mirror
| writing." '
|
| According to Wikipedia[0], one of the hypotheses for his
| motivation to write like this was to have better recall of the
| material.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_writing#Notable_example...
| Karellen wrote:
| I wonder why the choice to refer to him as "Leonardo", rather
| than "da Vinci"? Given that the latter appears to be the more
| common way of referring to him as the author of many of his other
| works?
|
| They don't refer to Einstein as "Albert".
| svat wrote:
| > _Referring to "Leonardo da Vinci" as "da Vinci" is like
| listing Lawrence of Arabia in the phone book as "Of Arabia, Mr.
| L,"_
|
| or
|
| > _The mistake of referring to Leonardo as "da Vinci" is so
| entrenched, I'm afraid it's uncorrectable. I have had to fight
| with editors about this: You say "Leonardo," and they want to
| say "da Vinci," thinking it's his last name -- thinking it's
| the same as saying "Reynolds." They think that, when you say
| "Leonardo," you're saying the equivalent of "Joshua." Actually,
| to say "da Vinci" is to say "of Orange," instead of "William."_
|
| (Both from _Cutting in line: What would 'Of Nazareth' do?_ at
| http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003151.h...
| a post about plagiarism including of these examples.)
|
| I, for one, welcome any deviation from the assumption that
| everyone's name is of the form "Given-name Surname".
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| "da Vinci" just means "from _(edited, thanks)_ a town called
| Vinci. " It doesn't actually identify him (even though everyone
| knows who you're talking about.)
|
| It's a cool article but as the comments point out, it's one
| heck of a stretch to compare these early notes to anything done
| by Einstein, or even Newton.
| bonzini wrote:
| Note that "da Vinci" means "from Vinci", a small town outside
| Florence and roughly 300 km away from Venice.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Note that Leonardo means "lion-like strength" in Italian.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Da Vinci means "from Vinci" which is a small town near
| Florence
| Karellen wrote:
| > It doesn't actually identify him (even though everyone
| knows who you're talking about.)
|
| Surely if it means that everyone knows who you're talking
| about, it _does_ actually identify him.
|
| Probably more so than "Leonardo" does. There are plenty of
| famous people called "Leonardo", but only one who is known as
| "da Vinci".
| netule wrote:
| I'm sure there are plenty of other Italian artists named
| Michelangelo, but you know who I'm referring to by just
| using his first name.
| hammock wrote:
| Leonardo's full name at birth was simply Leonardo. As an
| illegitimate child, he was fortunate that his father, Ser
| Piero, acknowledged him and let him be known as Leonardo di ser
| Piero.
|
| Leonardo was born in Anchiano, a tiny hamlet near the slightly-
| larger hamlet of Vinci. Ser Piero's family, however, were big
| fish in the little Vinci pond, and so tagged "da Vinci" ("of"
| or "from Vinci") after their names.
|
| When he became an apprentice, in order to distinguish himself
| from other various Tuscan Leonardos in 15th-century Florence,
| and because he had his father's blessing to do so, Leonardo was
| known as "Leonardo da Vinci."
|
| When he traveled beyond the Republic of Florence to Milan, he
| often referred to himself as "Leonardo the Florentine."
|
| Eventually, Leonardo became very famous. He became so famous,
| in fact, that for the past 500 years he has had no need of a
| last name (as with "Cher" or "Madonna"), let alone any
| indication of his father's home town.
|
| In art historic circles he is simply, as he started out in this
| world, Leonardo.
|
| "Da Vinci" as in "The Da Vinci Code" is kind of cringeworthy
| for anyone who traffics in Leonardo.
| Karellen wrote:
| > "Da Vinci" as in "The Da Vinci Code"
|
| I seem to recall him being referred to primarily as "da
| Vinci" in my childhood, long before that book was ever
| written.
|
| > for anyone who traffics in Leonardo.
|
| Interesting. That choice of phrasing makes "Leonardo" sound,
| to me, like a constructed shibboleth intended to gatekeep
| those who aren't "in the know". That's probably a slightly
| uncharitable take (sorry) but it was the first implication
| that just slapped me in the face.
|
| > In art historic circles he is simply, as he started out in
| this world, Leonardo.
|
| I wasn't aware that Ars Technica was aiming at the art
| historic circle crowd. ;-)
| subroutine wrote:
| Socialites who "trafficked in Leonardo" back in the 90s
| likely pulled the reverse stunt ( _anyone in the know calls
| him Da Vinci_ ) after a famous giant rat gave the name
| Leonardo to a mutant turtle ninja, as Leo was among the
| rats four favorite artists. TMNT was so popular in the 90s
| that if you said "I like Leonardo more than Michelangelo",
| and were not currently standing inside an art gallery,
| everyone would assume you were talking about Ninja Turtles.
| If you said "I like _Da Vinci_ more than Michelangelo "
| people would understand you were saying I like the artist
| Leonardo Da Vinci more than the ninja turtle Michelangelo
| ;)
| hammock wrote:
| Not trying to gatekeep. The fact is there are subcultures
| in which Leonardo da Vinci comes up in conversation far
| more than others. In those (particularly art history),
| Leonardo is most common
| [deleted]
| cft wrote:
| Democritus and epicureans correctly conjectured atoms 2400 years
| ago. But it takes mathematics to build a nuclear reactor.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, it only takes a critical amount of fissible material in a
| small enough space that the chain reaction will begin.
|
| They even occur in nature:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
| cft wrote:
| The key was the verb "to build", human-built nuclear
| reactors. Clearly, the Sun is a thermonuclear reactor, and it
| exists independently of humans.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It doesn't even take people to build a nuclear reactor, let
| alone mathematics.
| cft wrote:
| I am not sure what exactly "bouwen" means in Dutch, but
| the verb "to build" in English usually means the process
| of constructing something by humans or animals [1] [2]:
|
| 1.
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/build
|
| 2. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/build
|
| (As opposed to say "Valley _created_ by glacier ", or
| "The Sun was _formed_ through the gravitational
| attraction of cosmic dust particles ")
| jacquesm wrote:
| Even for humans it does not take math to build a nuclear
| reactor, you could pile a bunch of fissile material in a
| heap and it would happily do its thing.
|
| I really don't know what you are trying to get at here,
| unless you want to keep playing definition games which
| isn't all that interesting, regardless of what my native
| language is.
| paulpauper wrote:
| There is a huge difference between merely observing something or
| describing a phenomena vs. writing down the theory that describes
| it.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| There is, but historical context matters: it's very hard to
| have your works typeset in LaTeX if you lived before LaTeX was
| been invented; in the exact same way it's impossible to write
| out the theory when the notation for writing out theories
| hasn't been invented yet.
|
| Instead, as modern day investigators, we need to go through the
| material and figure out whether the writing was "just notes" or
| whether it was an "actual attempt at some kind of formal
| description using whatever system of formalization was
| available to the author at the time".
|
| You can't frame historical science in terms of modern science
| practices. Or even science practices from a mere 100 years
| after an author's death.
| xgstation wrote:
| Many great mathematicians and physicists had used time as 4th
| dimension, but none developed it out into special relativity,
| even Lorentz has his name on the Lorentz's transformation, but he
| didn't see a brand new space-time relationship. There is a huge
| gap between linking something together to writing it down with a
| mind boggling and fundamentally new theory to reshape how human
| beings see the universe. That said, all people's work are built
| on top of predecessors. Without generations work on mathematics
| before 20 century, Einstein wouldn't have developed GR as well.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Without generations work on mathematics before 20 century,
| Einstein wouldn't have developed GR as well.
|
| "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of
| giants" - Newton
|
| I'm sure Einstein would have no problem with applying such a
| quote to himself.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| He was infamous at being bad at math with hi wife doing some
| of the math for him. He never recognized her in doing so.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| He wasn't bad at math, but his wife was better at math than
| he was, and there is a lot of historical evidence
| suggesting they collaborated on his "miracle year" papers.
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| That's false he wasn't bad at math. It's a (false) myth
| that's perpetuated. Before he was years 15 old he'd
| mastered differential and integral calculus:
|
| https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,2
| 8...
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| I remember when I was a kid, I'd heard various things
| about how Einstein failed school or was bad at
| mathematics or was just a simple patent office clerk etc
| etc...
|
| Seems he was in fact super smart and educated at good
| schools / universities in the countries he lived in. As
| you'd expect from someone who revolutionised parts of
| science.
| voldacar wrote:
| He got a lot of math help from David Hilbert though as an
| adult
| ecshafer wrote:
| There is a myth, that Einstein was so bad at math that he
| failed math.
|
| There is also a quip by mathematicians and physicists
| that he just wasn't that good at math. I heard this a few
| times in undergrad physics, and the proof was typically
| that while he had good insight, his field equations for
| GR, Einstein said were neigh impossible to solve, but
| Schwarzchild and a few others almost instantly had
| solutions. Einstein was really good at math with regards
| to normal people, but when you compare with great
| mathematicians and physicists (Gauss, Euler, Von Neumann,
| etc), he was probably on the lower end.
| lstodd wrote:
| Tbh I was taught both in school at about the same age.
|
| This doesn't prevent me from kicking the kubernetes can
| down the road instead of coming up with more general
| relativity. Maybe it's the lust that's insufficient.
| 8note wrote:
| The low hanging fruit on physics discoveries using
| current technology is also all taken.
|
| The right person at the right place at the right time --
| the time is maybe the biggest one. It's not just Einstein
| who revolutionized physics, his contemporaries did too
| renewiltord wrote:
| He is also famous for hating bagels and distrusting his
| local bagel maker, who is the one who came up with the
| E=mc^2 equation to represent the ingredients of a bagel,
| which Einstein shamelessly copped for a Physics paper he
| published mostly to woo a local Austrian beauty who was
| known to find square roots attractive. It's crazy that so
| much of what we use today simply comes from one man's lust.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| GPT is that you?
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's all as true as the comment I replied to.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| The prompt was "make up some bullshit someone would say
| on Reddit about Einstein"
| cactacea wrote:
| Indeed
|
| https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-wall-of-albert-
| einsteins...
| dandanua wrote:
| To make such a significant breakthrough like relativity theory
| it's not enough to see connections between seemingly unrelated
| things.
|
| You have to have a sufficiently open and free mind to be able
| to discard beliefs of generations of scientists. Including your
| own, implanted through instincts.
| zinclozenge wrote:
| That's true about Lorentz, although for completeness I just
| want to point out that the geometric spacetime extension was
| done by Minkowski.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I think it's safe to say without 5000+ years of mathematically
| research Einstein wouldn't have developed GR.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| It's also remarkable that the mathematical tools required for
| GR were developed just in the few decades before Einstein
| wrote down his equations.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Yeah there's definitely some singularity like stuff
| happening. While we don't see visibly dramatic evolutions
| like GR happening, we are making incredible strides on
| unsolved problems and extravagantly complex discoveries at
| a blistering pace, so much so that they're not noteworthy
| any more.
| sockaddr wrote:
| Very true.
|
| From the perspective of something like a Tardigrade we
| are definitely well into a "singularity".
|
| From the perspective of a rock the Tardigrade itself is
| matter experiencing a "singularity".
| bognition wrote:
| One way to view things is that GR was obvious to a smart
| person with good enough tools and that if Einstein wouldn't
| have discovered it someone else would have soon after.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Hmmm, when I studied GR, the consensus was that it came
| out of nowhere and if it wasn't for Einstein's genius, it
| would have taken at least a long time until someone else
| had discovered it. But you make a good point. Ultimately
| it's an unanswerable question, I guess.
| [deleted]
| mjthrowaway1 wrote:
| When I studied GR my professor said that Maxwell was
| close and had he not died young it would've been him.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Of all the physical theories, general relativity is
| probably the one that's least likely to be true of.
| Because it just wasn't needed in all its generality at
| that point of time. Instead of going from first
| principles like Einstein some other physicist could have
| developed it from the other end, and made corrections to
| Newton mechanics based on the observed precession of
| Mercury and the deflection of starlight by the Sun (if
| someone would have done that observation without the
| impetus of GR). It could have been akin to how quantum
| theory in its first 25 years was a collection of ad-hoc
| explanations of various phenomena using the quantized
| energy idea but having no generalized theory of them.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Quantum mechanics and relativity are both explanations of
| the interferometer from Michelson-Morley.
|
| Which turns out to work, now called LIGO, if you apply
| relativistic and quantum corrections.
| jacquesm wrote:
| We'd have found out for sure when we first built a GPS
| system without relativity correction. It wouldn't work
| and that experimental error would have to be explained
| somehow and that in turn would lead to the discovery of
| GR if it had not been discovered through some other means
| at that time.
| mannykannot wrote:
| David Hilbert, for one, was apparently close. That said,
| I feel that it is a bit of a stretch to call it obvious
| (maybe more obvious in the sense of "this is the way to
| go" rather than that the answer was obvious.)
| mr_mitm wrote:
| From what I remember, Hilbert actually got the equations
| first by applying the principle of least action, so a
| much more mathematical than Einstein's physical approach.
| However, everybody agreed that Einstein did all the heavy
| lifting (he worked closely with mathematicians for years
| to figure things out), so that's why they aren't called
| the Einstein-Hilbert equations.
| chermi wrote:
| Least action is a very physical approach?
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Not compared to how Einstein derived the equations
| loufe wrote:
| Great point and you said it well. Darwin was much the same,
| many of the ideas he discusses were already out there, but he
| brought them together in a novel, united, coherent, and
| compelling way that really made the idea of evolution stand on
| its own feet.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Most great theories connect existing concepts:
|
| Darwin connected the specialization of finches to two bodies
| of existing work -- animal husbandry and the nest hierarchy
| of biology, by explaining they're both outcomes of
| reproductive selection.
|
| Einstein connected the idea of Galilean relativity to
| Maxwell's equations to explain why Michelson-Morley behaves
| how it does.
| evv555 wrote:
| >nest hierarchy of biology
|
| Which itself is a derivative of the "great chain of being"
| ontology which tried to explain the continuous gradation of
| structures in the world. Ideas like "missing link" appear
| within this worldview before Darwin's theory[1].
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being#Scala
| _Nat...
| credit_guy wrote:
| Why centuries before Einstein and not one century before Galileo?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Or, for that matter, Newton....
| credit_guy wrote:
| I would say that Newton had an insight unprecedented in the
| history of science: that phenomena as seemingly unrelated as
| the fall of an apple from a tree and the motion of the moon
| and planets are caused by the same physical laws.
|
| Leonardo does not show any hint of even thinking about this.
| prox wrote:
| Not yet anyway. Who know what else is in those notebooks.
| Slightly /s, but it's interesting that we still find new
| observations in his notebooks.
| panda-giddiness wrote:
| The equivalence of gravity and acceleration is one of the major
| ideas of general relativity.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle
| Trombone12 wrote:
| But that is certainly not what is being claimed here. What
| TFA says is that they think Leonardo correctly realised that
| falling things accelerate, as opposed to fall with a constant
| speed as (the ancient) Aristotelian physics prescribed.
|
| To go all the way to the (Einsteinian) equivalence principle
| from that is huffing great man hopium in the extreme:
| Leonardo is certainly not as user of reference frames, and
| the equivalence principle simply does not exist without them.
| Another problem is that he didn't know of inertia, what with
| being of the Aristotelian school.
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