Engineers from Caltech have discovered that Leonardo da Vinci's understanding of gravity-though not wholly accurate-was centuries ahead of his time.
In an article published in the journal Leonardo, the researchers draw upon a fresh look at one of da Vinci's notebooks to show that the famed polymath had devised experiments to demonstrate that gravity is a form of acceleration-and that he further modeled the gravitational constant to around 97 percent accuracy.
Da Vinci, who lived from 1452 to 1519, was well ahead of the curve in exploring these concepts. 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.
Da Vinci's experiments were first spotted by Mory Gharib, the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Medical Engineering, in the Codex Arundel, a collection of papers
