In biographies, Leonardo Da Vinci is often considered the prototype of the Renaissance "homo universalis" (man of universal spirit) and is listed as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist, mathematician, philosopher, writer and musician. In addition, he is usually extolled and praised as a great genius, inventor, discoverer, sage and humanist.
da-vinci-myth-man-scienceHowever, when one inquires about the specific contributions that Leonardo Da Vinci made to humanity, one usually finds that, except for some paintings that everyone automatically classifies as "masterpieces of painting", and rescuing the descriptions made on anatomy and physiology, their works are insignificant and inconsequential.
Why then is this character so praised and admired, not only in popular culture, but also among educated people? How did it become the myth that it is? Are your paintings really as spectacular as everyone repeats it? Why have you never published a book or at least an article that made real contributions to science and gave an account of its lucidity? What criteria or contributions have been considered to qualify Leonardo with the titles of "scientist", "mathematician" and "engineer?
This work criticizes different aspects of the life and work of Leonardo Da Vinci, but focuses on a comparative analysis between the achievements that have led to qualify him as a scientist, mathematician and engineer, and the current conceptions of the work of science, mathematics and engineering. In particular, emphasis is placed on what has to do with achievements in the field of engineering and current conceptions of the work of the engineer. The latter, because the author has a training in engineering and it is in that field where he finds the best arguments to criticize and, why not, disqualify attributions that for centuries have been made and continue to be made to this character; Furthermore, because it is offensive to an engineer who is called an invention, technological design, innovation or engineering work,to a drawing with some notations on the sides without clear and rigorous specifications of the final objective, dimensions, materials, manufacturing processes, applied physical laws, rigorous analysis of operation, costs and finances, social and environmental impact and calculations that denote a design based in rational choices and based on scientific knowledge.
First, a location of Leonardo Da Vinci is made in the context of the renaissance and the state of science and technology at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century, which is the time in which he lives, to try to visualize his role and influence it could have on the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Then a small conceptualization is made about the work of the scientist and the engineer, from the current perspective, to immediately make the comparison between the works of Da Vinci and what we currently call "scientific work" or "engineering work". And finally, Da Vinci turned into a myth is analyzed a bit.
1. ABOUT THE BIOGRAPHIES OF LEONARDO DA VINCI
The above are the classic annotations that are usually included in the biographies of Leonardo Da Vinci, always praising him, always exalting his superior capacities with respect to those of the rest of the mortals, but concrete achievements are never shown that attest to contributions made to science and engineering as such. Only in painting, where some twenty fully finished works are attributed to him, there is evidence of real productions of this character, and that, in most cases, it is debated whether they are really his works or those of other people who are they attributed them to him for making the paintings more economically valuable. As for the production of text, it only has to be said that the only legacy is a few individual notes, which some estimate at 13,000 pages,and that they are presented to us as maxims or as quotes that are made from a document, without taking into account any context, antecedents or consequences.
Due to this misrepresentation of the life and work of Leonardo Da Vinci, any serious study that wants to be done on this character must start from his original legacy and from reliable essays that allow inferring the reality of his work regardless of the generalized opinions that it they exalt and praise it without objective arguments. For this work, then, the notes published in the book "Leonardo Da Vinci: selected texts" have been taken into account, which have been published by the Universidad de Antioquia Editorial and are based on the texts of the Agustín Codazzi Geographical Institute and RICHTER (See bibliography). The text Agustín Codazzi Geographical Institute presents the original texts in Italian and their translation into English, Richter's notes are in English.
In addition to the aforementioned texts, a large amount of material has been consulted on the internet, which although it is very repetitive and little documented, as a whole, separated from the opinions and exaltations that distort it, it ends up showing the real legacy of Da Vinci.
2. STATE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE TIMES OF LEONARDO DA VINCI
To locate Leonardo Da Vinci in time and culture, it is enough to identify the characteristics of the period known as "the Renaissance", of which Leonardo is a classic exponent.
Renaissance is the name given to the literary, artistic and scientific renewal that took place in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, particularly under the influence of classical culture brought back into fashion. It was facilitated mainly by the discovery of the printing press that allowed the popularization of the great works of the thinkers of antiquity, and by the invention of engraving. It started in Italy, passed to France and then to all of Europe and, belatedly, reached the newly discovered American territories.
The term renaissance refers to the reactivation of knowledge and progress after centuries of predominance of the dogmatic mentality established in Europe by the Catholic Church in the period known as the “Middle Ages”. This new stage raised a new way of seeing the world and the human being, an interest in the arts, politics and sciences, replacing medieval theocentrism with a certain anthropocentrism.
Leonardo Da Vinci was a typical Renaissance man who read the ancient Greeks from whom he sometimes took ideas and in other cases criticized. “About the figures of the elements; and first against those who deny Plato's views and who hold that if the elements were included in each other in the ways Plato attributed to them they would cause a void within each other. I say that it is not true, and here I prove it… ”, it is an explicit annotation on Plato, but there is a phrase that emulates the famous Plato slogan that says:“ nobody enters here who does not know geometry ”, and it is this:“ nobody that is not a mathematician read my works «. As for the theory of knowledge, he emulates Aristotle: “all our knowledge has its origin in our sensations”. Within his drawings the Archimedean screw appears,invented by Archimedes of Syracuse in the 3rd century BC So if Leonardo Da Vince is to be assigned an ideology, it has its roots and foundations in the ancient Greeks, as was usual in Renaissance thinkers.
Science in Da Vinci's times
In general, the Renaissance favored studies focused on the humanistic and not on the sciences as we know them today, in fact, science as such did not exist, but during Leonardo's life there were events that transformed the vision that humanity had of the world and life and it seems that Leonardo Da Vinci did not realize them as was the exposition of a heliocentric astronomical system in which the Earth orbited around the Sun, in 1507, by Nicolás Copernicus. In this regard, a note by Leonardo says: "The earth is not the center of the sun's orbit nor is it at the center of the universe, but rather it is at the center of its companion elements and is united with them….". It is not clear which companion elements he refers to, but it is inferred that it has not occurred to him that the earth revolves around the sun.
In what has to do with the ideas of force and movement, Da Vinci does not surpass the ideas of Aristotle: “… gravity is limited to the elements of water and earth; but this force is unlimited and through it infinite worlds could be moved if instruments were created to generate this force… the force has its origin in spiritual movement; and this movement, which flows through the limbs of the animals that feel, causes their muscles to enlarge… the quality and quantity of a man's force are capable of giving rise to other forces, which will be greater in proportion to the longer duration of the forces that produced them ”. These ideas, which today seem totally misguided compared to those that Newton would later present,show that in matters of science Leonardo Da Vinci is completely immersed in the medieval world that is none other than the world of Aristotle.
The above fragments clearly show that Da Vinci's times are the times of alchemy, magic, and esotericism.
In what has to do with anatomy and physiology, it seems that humanity was in an exploratory stage of the human body in which Leonardo Da Vinci was really a pioneer who described in detail many organs and their functioning which, later, would allow the knowledge of multiple pathologies and the emergence of modern medicine.
Finally, it is highlighted that the most important and revolutionary characteristic of the science of the Renaissance was the search for the explanation of phenomena based on reason and experimentation, and Da Vinci participated in this search. With this change in approach, the foundations of the scientific revolution are beginning to be laid. Leonardo Da Vinci practiced and preached experimentation, but not in the rigorous way required by the scientific method: “We have to consult experience in a variety of cases and circumstances until we can extract from them a general rule that is contained therein. What are these rules useful for? They lead us to further research on Nature and artistic creations. They prevent us from deceiving ourselves or others by promising results that cannot be achieved.It posed a practical attitude towards medieval methods and concepts, but did not establish a methodology or a philosophy of science. His approach was rather empirical and intuitive.
Mathematics in the Renaissance
The most important significance of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a fact that began the Renaissance, for the history of mathematics, is that, first Italy and then the rest of Europe, benefited from translations of the manuscripts of Greek treatises. At first classical Greek geometry was less significant than the editions of the medieval Latin translations of the Arabic algebraic and arithmetic treatises because there were no translations to facilitate its access, but as the Renaissance progressed, the original geometry of the Greeks became known in special Euclid and Archimedes.
In this period important studies of arithmetic appeared, but the area of greatest development was undoubtedly algebra, where third and fourth degree equations were solved using radicals.
In terms of practical applications, in the Renaissance very elementary applications were made in mechanics, art, surveying, accounting, cartography and optics.
Leonardo Da Vinci, it can be argued, idolized mathematics, but there is no evidence that he posed and solved any problem where he applied and solved the most elementary equation of the first degree. He made descriptive drawings in which he applied some concepts of geometry and established some relationships between quantities, but there are no numerical calculations or something similar to proofs of geometric theorems. One of his maxims was: "Whoever denies the supreme certainty of mathematics, encourages confusion and can never disallow the contradictions of false science that lead to eternal charlatanism…".
State of technology at the beginning of the Renaissance
The new mindset acquired in the Renaissance significantly influenced the development of technology. Manual work and the practical applications of knowledge are no longer dishonorable, and new social conditions demand the development of new technologies. Salaried armies arise equipped with firearms: arquebuses and cannons; the caravels appear and then the galleons; sailors undertake long voyages and require more precise instruments; the boom of the book accelerates the manufacture and improvements of the printing presses; the aspirations of the bourgeoisie drive inventions and innovations in various fields, but especially in metallurgy, mechanics and the textile industry; new materials and new tools are required for architecture and the construction of large civil works; etc.It could almost be said that the renaissance generated a technological revolution in all the fields of work of the societies of the time.
The vast majority of drawings related to mechanisms and technological devices bequeathed by Leonardo Da Vinci do not correspond to innovations or designs that he has conceived, but are drawings of machines and mechanisms that already existed many years ago, such as windmills, cannons, wheels, pinions, gears, levers, pulleys, crankshafts, chains, screws and cranks, among others. The machines themselves that he drew and designed, as well as civil works and architectural drawings, in general, were never carried out and, therefore, did not exist, they are not inventions or designs by Da Vinci or anyone else, not They belong to the Renaissance or any other age.
3. LIFE AND WORK OF DA VINCI
3.1 LIFE
The illegitimate son of Ser Piero, a notary and a prosperous landowner, Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452 in the Vinci castle, near Florence. His mother was a young peasant woman with whom Ser Piero had an illegitimate relationship and who in 1457 married a peasant from the region. After his mother's marriage, he was welcomed into the home of his father's family in the town of Vinci, who had married Albiera degli Amador, a sixteen-year-old girl from a wealthy family in Florence. This, having no children, turned her affection on Leonardo, but died at a very young age due to birth complications, in 1464. Although he was fully considered from birth as his father's son, Da Vinci was never formally recognized as a legitimate son. His father was married four times,giving him ten legitimate younger brothers and two sisters. She received the usual elementary education at that time: reading, writing and arithmetic. As for Latin, the key language of traditional learning, Leonardo did not study it seriously until much later when he acquired the ability to understand it for himself. Just at the age of 30, he devoted himself to mathematics - advanced geometry and arithmetic - but never went beyond an elementary level.
Cuando tenía unos quince años entró como aprendiz al taller de Andrés Verrocchio, donde no sólo aprendió pintura y escultura, sino también artes técnico-mecánicas. En 1472 fue aceptado en el gremio de pintores de Florencia aunque permaneció cinco años más en el taller de su maestro y luego trabajó independientemente hasta 1481. En sus dibujos iniciales hay muchos bosquejos técnicos, tales como bombas, armas y aparatos mecánicos. Se relacionó con los eruditos más prominentes de su época: Benedetto Aritmetico el matemático, el arquitecto Brunelleschi, el físico, astrónomo y geógrafo Toscanelli y el humanista aristotélico Giovanni Argiropoulo. Además, fue profundamente influenciado por el arquitecto León Battista Alberti, quien es considerado el mayor teórico del renacimiento.
In 1478 Leonardo moved to Milan and entered the service of Ludovico Sforza el Moro, after having written him a letter in which he offered himself as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, inventor and hydraulic designer, in the best style of the traditional “todero paisa”. There he remained until December 1499, when the Sforza family was expelled from Milan by French troops. Then Leonardo left unfinished the only sculpture that he began to build (it was destroyed by the French archers who used it as a target) and returned to Florence in 1500.
During his stay in Florence, he traveled to Rome for a year. In 1502 he entered the service of César Borgia, Duke of Romagna, son of Pope Alexander VI. In his capacity as the Duke's architect and senior engineer, Leonardo supervised work on the fortresses in the papal territories of central Italy. In 1503, already in Florence, he was a member of the commission of artists in charge of deciding on the proper location of Michelangelo's David (1501-1504, Academia, Florence), and also worked as an engineer in the war against Pisa. At the end of this year he began to plan the decoration for the great hall of the palazzo della Signoria with the theme of the Battle of Anghiari, a Florentine victory in the war against Pisa. He made numerous drawings and completed a cartoon in 1505, but never did the painting on the wall.
In 1506 he returned to Milan in the service of the French governor Charles II Chaumont, Marshal of Amboise. The following year he was appointed court painter to Louis XII of France, who was then residing in the Italian city. For the next six years Leonardo divided his time between Milan and Florence, where he often visited his stepbrothers and stepsisters and looked after his estate. In Milan he continued his engineering projects and worked on the equestrian monument of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, commander of the French forces in the city. Although the project was never completed, drawings and studies on it are preserved. From 1514 to 1516 he lived in Rome under the patronage of Giuliano de Medici, brother of Pope Leo X. He was staying in the Belvedere Palace in the Vatican,and was primarily concerned with scientific and technical experiments. In 1516 he moved to France to the court of Francis I, where he spent his last years at the Château de Cloux, near Amboise, where he died on May 2, 1519.
3.2 WORK
Leonardo was not a cultured man in the style of his time: he did not learn Latin and he was not the prototype of a humanist, calling himself a "man without letters", which is why he was ignored by contemporary scholars. He also did not master algebra, so he cannot be considered a mathematician. Endowed with an acute capacity for observation, in his approach to science he never stood out for his theoretical explanations or for resorting to planned experiments; Instead, to understand the phenomena that interested him, he described them and drawn them down to the smallest details, planning to make a large encyclopedia based on drawings.
His descriptions of human anatomy are perhaps more relevant than his pictorial works. Leonardo's training in the anatomy of the human body began during his apprenticeship with Andrea del Verrocchio, as this teacher insisted that all his students learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became a master of topographic anatomy, drawing muscles, tendons, and other visible anatomical features; likewise, he drew the heart and vascular system, the sexual organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero.
From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with Dr. Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 under the title "Treatise on painting." Outside of this, he never published or distributed the contents of his manuscripts and they remained unpublished until the 19th century when they could be known and disseminated.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals. He dissected cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, comparing their anatomical structure with that of humans in his drawings. He also made interesting studies on the anatomy of horses.
His notes contain drawings of numerous artifacts such as various flying machines, including a helicopter-like device. On January 3, 1496, he tried one of his machines to fly without success. In addition, he studied or foreshadowed firearms, armored tanks, the diving snorkel, the parachute, a submarine, and a geared device believed to be a calculating machine.
In 1502 Leonardo designed a 240 m span bridge that was part of a construction project for Sultan Bayezid II of Constantinople. The work was never done.
3.2.1 Leonardo as an artist
Painting
From 1472 when Leonardo Da Vinci began his first painting until his death in 1519, there are a total of 24 paintings completed and universally accepted as his works without further discussion. It is equivalent to one painting every two years, that is, it is hardly the production of an amateur. Sketched or unfinished paintings do not deserve to be considered as part of his work, since there is no point in attributing merits for works that were never done or that did not have the minimum merit of having been finished. Regarding the quality of these works, it is difficult to make a judgment because beauty is subjective and all opinions are respectable,But what does deserve reproach and disqualification is to call paintings that physically deteriorated a few years after they were made due to the use of novel techniques not previously studied or experienced, as happened, among others, as a “masterpiece”. with "The Battle of Anghiari" and "The Last Supper".
Sculpture
Leonardo Da Vinci proclaimed himself as a sculptor in the Treatise on painting: "Dedicating myself to both sculpture and painting, and exercising one as the other to the same degree…"; made some sketches of two equestrian monuments that he projected and that he never made (of one of them he managed to make a clay model); he made drawings of supposed sculptural projects and some models that he used for his paintings, and that was what gave him fame and recognition as a sculptor, but in reality, he never made any sculptor, he was not a sculptor.
Music
No written musical composition has been found of Da Vinici that classifies him as a composer, but it is said that he improvised. What can be affirmed is that he worked as a musician at the Sforza court while he was in the service of Ludovico el Moro and that, when he arrived in Milan, he played the lyre and the lute. Among his favorite books is "The Art of Music", a treatise written around 1025 by Guido d'Arezzo. Among his paintings is the "Portrait of a Musician", which is the only male portrait attributed to Da Vinci. In addition, he drew water organs, paper organs and mills that instead of grain ground notes, sources that supposedly would allow him to create new rhythms. He spent time and interest in studying how sound is generated and how to perfect the space to achieve better acoustics but,As in everything he undertook, there are no results to show. From all this it is concluded that Leonardo was a music lover, but never that she was a musician.
Architecture
The same can be said of Leonardo Da Vinci's architectural production as of sculpture: many sketches, but no realizations. He drew towns with underground drainage channels, buildings and elevated streets, castles, churches, palaces. In addition, he left a large number of notes on architecture where he talks about cracks, the stability of buildings, foundations and resistance of arches, beams and supports. Regarding the resistance of materials, it must be said that Leonardo made some speculations about what would happen if some forces or dimensions were varied, but there is no evidence that he has done experiments that eventually led him to conclusions that went beyond the evident proportionality between the strength of a support and the cross-sectional area. In conclusion,In architecture there is nothing to show either in theory or in practice, therefore we cannot qualify Da Vinci as an architect either.
Literature
Leonardo wrote some short fables, poems and humorous stories. His literary production is so short and so poor that it is hardly mentioned in the biographies. As a writer, he did not publish any documents although he prepared jointly with
Marcantonio della Torre the "Treatise on the paint", which was published 161 years after his death. The texts that are known about him are his notebooks that total approximately 13 thousand pages. These notes were written using a special type of shorthand that he himself invented, in which the texts go from right to left and in order to read them it is necessary to reflect them in a mirror. There are also no arguments to qualify da Vinci as a writer.
3.2.2 Leonardo as scientist and engineer
In the publication, "The notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci", Da Vinci's notes are classified by areas and it is assumed that in each of them he made "investigations". The scientific and engineering areas considered in this publication are: mathematics, astronomy, physics, architecture, military engineering, anatomy and biology, physiology, comparative anatomy, glottology, optics, flight, botany, geology and geography, hydraulics and nautical, mechanics and machines.. There are actually many fields in which this character was interested, but if we analyze the history of the development of each one of them we find that, except for the descriptions made on physiology and anatomy, there are no significant contributions in any of them and in their development historical Leonardo Da Vinci is not mentioned at all.
In these fields, the most worthwhile thing about Da Vinci is his empirical attitude that breaks with the contempt of the ancients for manual work and the practical: "There is no higher or lower knowledge, but a unique knowledge that emanates from experimentation". In addition, he theorized about the methodology: “When approaching a scientific problem, I first have various experiments, since I try to determine the problem according to experience, then showing that bodies are forced to act in this way. That is the method to be followed in all investigations of the phenomena of Nature. However, it does not seem that in practice it was very consistent with this statement and, if it was, it did not bring much results. Anyway, surely for very valid reasons,The origin of the scientific method is attributed mainly to the philosophers Francis Bacon and Renato Descartes, and to the first true scientist known to mankind: Galileo Galilei. The difference is that of the latter we have results and evidences, but of Da Vinci there are none, of him we only have thousands of notes that are mostly statements and descriptions of trivial and inconsequential things but no law or principle that denotes the rigorous application of a method that has brought it to a universal conclusion.We only have thousands of notes about him, most of which are statements and descriptions of trivial and inconsequential things, but no law or principle that denotes the rigorous application of a method that has led to a universal conclusion.We only have thousands of notes about him, most of which are statements and descriptions of trivial and inconsequential things, but no law or principle that denotes the rigorous application of a method that has led to a universal conclusion.
When it comes to engineering jobs, Da Vinci held many positions as an engineer, yet of the things he projected, practically none were done or taken into account by his employers. Some of his engineering projects are briefly described below.
Civil works
In 1502 Leonardo designed a 240 m span bridge that was part of a construction project for Sultan Bayezid II of Constantinople. The work was never done. In 1503, while Florence was at war with Pisa, she planned to divert the Arno River and planned the construction of a canal with locks that would link Florence to the sea, but the project failed due to a miscalculation after employing 2000 workers and the matter He also drew many bridges, but none were built.
Mechanics
He analyzed numerous elements of machines, already existing in his time, and drew numerous machines where these elements were part of them as a mechanical "anatomy". Among the many projected machines are: helicopters, flying machines, automobiles, bicycles, war tanks, mortars, cannons, machine guns, ships, submarines, dredgers, textile machines, mills, screw jacks, assault and defense devices and many others. More than ever they were built, that is, they did not exist, they were not invented by Leonardo Da Vinci.
4. SCIENCE AFTER LEONARDO
During the Renaissance - time between 1453, when Constantinople falls, and 1564, when Michelangelo dies - live Leonardo Da Vinci (1452, 1519), Nicolás Copernicus (1473, 1543), Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Giodano Bruno (1548-1600), Galileo Galileo (1564-1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571 -1630) among others, who have in common that they were great observers of nature and can be considered precursors or creators of the scientific method; But there is one thing that differentiates Leonardo Da Vinci from the rest, and that is that he did not formulate a law, a universal scientific proposal, that would generate some change in the vision of the world and serve as support for others to formulate new theories.
A little later than these, in the seventeenth century, which some call the "century of physics", are: Renato Descartes (1596 - 1650), Evangelista Torricelli (1608 - 1647), Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), Christian Huygens (1629 - 1695), John Locke (1632 - 1704), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Edmund Halley (1656 - 1742) and Sir Isaac Newton (1643– 1727), who also have in common being men of science and they made notable contributions to humanity and forged the foundations of the Enlightenment.
In the 18th century there was a movement of intellectuals who ventured to know and explore the universe and whose purpose was to dispel the darkness of humanity through reason, and it was called "Enlightenment." For this reason the 18th century is also known as "The century of lights." At this time, thinkers argued that human reason could combat ignorance, superstition and tyranny, and build a better world and they insisted on it. And it had a great influence on economic, political and social aspects of the time and contributed to improving the quality of life of humanity.
All these scientists, philosophers and movements after Leonardo Da Vinci made important contributions to change the conception of the world since the most ancient times, and each one relied on their predecessors. But the questions come: How many of these great thinkers after Leonardo Da Vinci leaned on him? Did anyone take their observations for deeper studies like, for example, Kepler did with Tycho Brahe's observations? When Newton wrote that “If I have been able to see further it has been because I have climbed on the shoulders of giants”, did you think of Leonardo Da Vinci? Did Leonardo Da Vinci make any contribution, theoretical or practical, for these characters to emerge, or any contribution to "The Scientific Revolution"?
In the prologue of the text "The notes of the Leonardo Da Vinci", it is stated that Leonardo's texts were highly appreciated and valued in the 16th and 17th centuries and gives as an argument the high prices that his notes reached. This argument is not valid to affirm that the scientists or intellectuals of that time were interested in his notes to consult and study them because Leonardo was always recognized and famous, even in life, but his fame is not due to his scientific or technological contributions but to the painting, and it may have happened that many wealthy people were interested in his notes and were willing to pay large sums to collect them as relics. A priori, it can be said that no scientist or engineer, except perhaps in matters of anatomy and physiology,He turned to Da Vinci's notes to document himself and advance his science.
5. THE WORKS OF LEONARDO DA VINCI AND THE CURRENT DISCOURSE OF SCIENCE, MATHEMATICS AND ENGINEERING
5.1 LEONARDO AND THE SPEECH OF SCIENCE
"Science is the set of systematically ordered knowledge about the universe, obtained by observation and reasoning, which allow the deduction of general principles and laws. Science is the knowledge about the true nature of the Universe ”.
According to the above definitions, was Leonardo Da Vinci a scientist?
The first thing that should be observed is whether Leonardo Da Vinci applied the scientific method and then did participate or not in the ordering of any of the sciences and if the knowledge provided was later ordered and systematized within any of the sciences that occupied it. Finally, it should be observed whether the knowledge provided is universal principles and laws.
It must be recognized that Da Vinci was a great observer and that he recorded his observations through drawings and sketches, and that he also makes reasons that lead him to formulate some conclusions, but they do not show evidence of having carried out a search plan that has led him to verify a hypothesis through a process of experimentation. Let's look at an example of a "scientific" text by Leonardo:
"That the heat of the sun resides in its nature and not in its virtue (or mode of action) is amply demonstrated by the radiance of the solar body in which the human eye cannot remain and, in addition to this, no less clearly by the rays reflected by a concave mirror, which, when they strike the eye with such splendor that the eye cannot bear them, have a brightness equal to the sun in their own place. And that this is true I demonstrate by the fact that if the mirror has its concavity formed exactly as required to gather and reflect these rays, no created being could withstand the heat that would strike from the rays reflected by such a mirror. And if it is argued that the mirror itself is cold and yet sends out hot rays,I would answer that these rays really come from the sun and that it is the ray of the concave mirror after it has passed through the window ”.
There is a reasoning in this text that allows us to infer that Leonardo experimented with a concave mirror, but did he do it to prove that the heat of the sun resides in its nature? Or out of curiosity or accident he observed the phenomenon and concluded that the heat of the sun resides in its nature. If the reasoning and conclusion are valid, for science it does not matter which came first, but in this context, the question of interest is: Did Leonardo Da Vince apply the scientific method? It seems not. If he had applied it, the same experiment would have led him to other questions that would have kept him focused for many years on the same subject, even all his life, and that Leonardo did not. In this case, questions would have arisen, such as:What other experiment could be used to more strongly demonstrate this property of the sun? What if I did the same with the rays of the moon? What if I used the firelight? Does the light of distant stars have the same property? And the wandering ones? What if the sun were a concave mirror that receives the light of another star and reflects it on the earth? Why does the mirror have to be exactly the shape required? Why is the same property not perceived if the mirror has another shape? Why does the mirror reflect light and heat? Are light and heat of the same nature?… And hundreds, even thousands of questions related to the subject could be asked; but when responding to one of them –by means of an experimentation plan–, many other questions would arise and the process would never end.
The foregoing gives arguments to conjecture that Da Vinci did not seek knowledge, but rather that his curiosity led him to observe phenomena and then reason about them and formulate conclusions that he must later demonstrate by deduction. But this is not the scientific method and the consequences are that Da Vinci's scientific-type assertions are made about trivial and minor phenomena because with this methodology it is not possible to arrive at the formulation of universal laws on which a science can be based., except perhaps, in eminently descriptive fields such as anatomy and physiology, but not in more complex fields such as physics, chemistry or astronomy.
Let's look at an example: “… the moon is cold and wet. The water is cold and damp. So our seas must appear to the moon the same as the moon appears to us ”. Studying the reflection of light in the waters of the sea is that Da Vinci concludes that if the moon reflects the light of the sun then it is because its surface is oceans, and thus introduces a false premise for the following reasoning that leads him to a lacking conclusion validity.
When it comes to the systematization of knowledge, Leonardo is completely cracked. If the 13 thousand pages that make up his notes were organized and systematized material, surely, they would constitute an encyclopedia capable of containing most of the scientific knowledge of the time. But in reality they are single messy notes that supposedly would become part of treatises that Da Vinci never began to elaborate and order. There is no proof whatsoever that Leonardo has formulated the bases - axioms - of any science or that he has given continuity to any of the classical authors other than some isolated objection to a statement by any of them. In other words, he did not systematize, he did not build science.
Finally, in what has to do with the universality of its affirmations and their incorporation within the sciences, it is enough to say that no science is known that contains a principle, a law, a theorem or an axiom that was born from Da Vinci's mind.
In conclusion, Leonardo Da Vinci does not meet the requirements to be called a "man of science."
5.2. LEONARDO AND THE DISCOURSE OF MATHEMATICS
Leonardo Da Vinci's mathematics is nothing more than some geometric relationships or some elementary arithmetic reasoning. To illustrate the depth of Da Vinci's arithmetic, let's look at this example: “if a pillar were nine times as high as its width - that is, if it were one arm wide, according to the rule it should be nine arms high - then If one places 100 of these pillars together, this mass would have a width of 10 arms and 9 high; and if the first pillar can carry ten thousand pounds, the second since it is only as high as it is wide and therefore lacks 8 parts of its proper length, this, that is, each pillar joined in this way, will bear eight times more that when he is alone; that is to say, if in the first instance it loaded ten thousand pounds, now it would load 90 thousand ”.This problem demonstrates the confusion and inability of Da Vinci for mathematical reasoning and scientific work in general, because it would have been more logical and more practical to say that if a pillar carries 10,000 pounds, then 100 pillars should carry a million pounds. He could also have reasoned that the power of each pillar is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the pillar and then say that if the first pillar with a section of a square arm loads 10,000 pounds, a second pillar with a section of 100 square arms should carry a million pounds. In addition, and as another proof that he did not use the scientific method, if he had taken the problem to experimentation he would have found the truth value of the statement made and then would have had to discard the statement he wanted to prove as erroneous:"The pillar that has increased due to its thickness will gain more than its due power, in direct proportion to what it loses in relative height."
Leonardo did not work on pure mathematics and therefore did not try to find patterns, or formulate new conjectures, and even less did he try to reach mathematical truth, he was not a mathematician.
5.3. LEONARDO AND THE ENGINEERING SPEECH
We see in these quotes that Leonardo Da Vinci goes from being an admired painter in life, to being a scientist who is interested in everything and explores it to finally become a genius, a superior and extraordinary being, a myth.
In this evolutionary process of his image, it could be thought that the science and the work of Da Vinci had not been understood and that for that reason only with the passing of the centuries his works and his thought are recognized and valued, but what works? What thoughts? The problem is that there are no jobs, no theoretical or practical references, real productions that justify placing Da Vinci in a higher place on the scale of human intelligence and wisdom. Just as there are no scientific productions that allow him to be classified as a scientist, nor engineering works that qualify him as an engineer, there is no intellectual production that allows him to be classified as a genius.
In 2003 "The Da Vinci Code" was published, a novel that quickly became a world best seller with more than 80 million copies sold and translated into 44 languages. The dream of any writer. And what was the secret? It does not seem that it was the literary quality of the work, nor the plot that develops in it; it seems rather that the success is in the title. It is a title that evokes the superior being who invented everything, did everything and knew everything, and that can also be associated with reverse writing and medieval witches. All the ingredients for a mystery novel. Da Vinci's fame grows, the internet is full of biographies of him, the number of admirers increases every time, but where is what Leonardo Da Vinci did? It doesn't matter, the important thing is to imitate him, to appear intellectual without trying too hard…
7. CONCLUSION
After a broad visualization of the life and work of Leonardo Da Vinci, and after comparing his work with the current conceptions of what the work of science, mathematics and engineering is, it is concluded that, definitely, in these fields Da Vinci is more myth than reality. Anyone who did not advance beyond the observation and description of some substances or phenomena without reaching the universal, necessary and perennial statements that characterize scientific knowledge cannot be qualified as a scientist. And neither can prove the title of mathematician who did not master the knowledge that in this field already had in his time. And less deserves the title of engineer who did not get to the execution of any of his works, supposedly designed and planned.
The above does not mean that Leonardo has not made contributions to science and technology. He did them, but indirectly, in the same way as Plato carried out mathematics without having been a mathematician and without having practiced as such. The fact that Da Vinci was recognized in life, although more as an artist than as a scientist or engineer, made the generations that followed him interested in his drawings and issues of concern, not to resume their investigations and deductions from which, in True, there was nothing to take but to formulate research problems, which significantly boosted the advancement of science and technology with all the consequences this has for humanity.
But in general terms, and as a very personal opinion, in science and technology, Leonardo Da Vinci is nothing more than a myth, and as such, he represents a reality that never existed, a clairvoyance and a lucidity that most humans we long for, and because we cannot reach it, we project onto someone that almost no one dares to question and who makes us a kind of "fans" comparable to the followers of athletes and celebrity characters whom we exalt and overvalue in exchange for feeling like members of the same group, while avoiding us to come face to face with our failures and frustrations.
In sociology, Erich From called this attitude "Fear of freedom", in science, perhaps, it could be approached as "impotence to assimilate science and technology". An example to justify this position is the following: a person who has some clear notions about the principles that govern the operation of a helicopter and about the complexities involved in its manufacture, would never qualify Leonardo Da Vinci even as a precursor of this invention because knows that in that invention he did not contribute anything at all, but a person who has no idea how this device works or how it is built and who has hardly heard that it is something very complex, then attributes it to someone who qualified himself as himself as "illiterate", someone popular, of the same class, someone with whom he could share his own ignorance,but at the same time he was able to do it before the scientists and engineers with all their formulas and resources, and then he proclaimed at the top of his lungs: "Leonardo Da Vinci was the one who invented it." The same applies to the car, the parachute and anything that bears any resemblance to any of his drawings.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- EDITORIAL MARÍN. Leonardo da Vinci. Barcelona, Marin, 1978. p. 82 - 125.AGUSTÍN CODAZZI GEOGRAPHIC INSTITUTE. Leonardo da Vinci. Novara, IGAC, 1956. 518p. 2v. EDITORIAL MARÍN. Great masters of art: Leonardo. Barcelona, Marín, 1975. 126 p.RICHTER, Jean Paul. The notes of the Leonardo Da Vinci: Compiled and edited from the original manuscripts. New York, Dover Publications, 1970. 471 p. 2v. (Online version: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5000/pg5000.html) NARANJO MESA, Jorge Alberto. Leonardo Da Vinci: selected texts. Medellín, University of Antioquia, 2009. 199 p. TORO ALFONSO, Jaime; RIVERA BERNAL, Fernando and RODRÍGUEZALBARRACÍN, Eudoro. Leonardo Da Vinci: three essays. spi. 130 p. VALENCIA GIRALDO, Asdrúbal. The engineer Leonardo Da Vinci. In: Faculty of Engineering Magazine. No 32. (Dec., 2004). p. 114-133.
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