Codex Arundel, the title sounds like a collection of elven stories. It is a notebook of several hundred pages written by Leonardo da Vinci and acquired by the Count of Arundel in the 17th century.e century. If this collection, now in the British Library in London, is coming to the fore again, it is thanks to a recent study published in the journal Leonardo.

Morteza Gharib, an aeronautical researcher at Caltech and lead author of the publication, and two colleagues got to know the work of the Italian genius. Three scientists found that “Leonardo da Vinci pierced the nature of gravity two centuries before Isaac Newton” Write The newspaper “New York Times. “He already understood that it is gravity that keeps the seas from falling off the Earth,” says his biographer Walter Isaacson.

Gravity Understanding Pitcher

Morteza Gharib’s attention was drawn to the triangle drawn in the upper right corner of page 143 of the codex. The vision in this image of a moving jug pouring water was “eureka moment” says the scientist in the columns of an American newspaper. The professor has just realized what Leonardo da Vinci learned before anyone else:

“This experience [lui] made it possible to estimate the constant of nature, the gravitational constant.

The pitcher experiment shows that Leonardo da Vinci understood that gravity is a constant force causing constant acceleration. “A discovery that, a hundred years later, will be officially made by Galileo and then confirmed by Isaac Newton at the end of the 17th century.e century”, say it The newspaper “New York Times.

Despite the rudimentary nature of the tools at his disposal, Leonardo “it was possible to calculate the gravitational constant with an accuracy, [seulement] 10% compared to the value obtained with our modern tools”, emphasizes Morteza Gharib.

According to an American professor, “Leonardo da Vinci is much more than an artist, and his fame as a scientist can skyrocket if competent experts carefully study the Arundel Code and other texts.” genius of the Renaissance.

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