Engineer finds a huge physics discovery in da Vinci's 'irrelevant scribbles'

It was right in front of us all along.

Until now, art historians dismissed some doodles in da Vinci’s notebooks as “irrelevant.”

But a new study from Ian Hutchings, a professor at the University of Cambridge, showed that one page of these scribbles from 1493 actually contained something groundbreaking: The first written records demonstrating the laws of friction.

Although it has been common knowledge that da Vinci conducted the first systematic study of friction (which underpins the modern science of tribology, or the study of friction, lubrication, and wear), we didn’t know how and when he came up with these ideas.

Hutchings was able to put together a detailed chronology, pinpointing da Vinci’s "Aha!" moment to a single page of scribbles penned in red chalk in 1493.

According to Gizmodo, the page drew attraction towards the beginning of the 20th century because of a faint etching of a woman near the top, followed by the statement "cosa bella mortal passa e non dura", which translates to "mortal beauty passes and does not last".

But a 1920s museum director dismissed the page as "irrelevant notes and diagrams in red chalk".

Almost a century later, Hutchings thought this page was worth a second look. He discovered that the rough geometrical figures drawn underneath the red notes show rows of blocks being pulled by a weight hanging over a pulley – in exactly the same kind of experiment students might do today to demonstrate the laws of friction.

"The sketches and text show Leonardo understood the fundamentals of friction in 1493," said Hutchings in a University of Cambridge press release.

"He knew that the force of friction acting between two sliding surfaces is proportional to the load pressing the surfaces together and that friction is independent of the apparent area of contact between the two surfaces. These are the 'laws of friction' that we nowadays usually credit to a French scientist, Guillaume Amontons, working two hundred years later."

Centuries ahead of his time

Hutchings was also able to show how da Vinci went on to use his understanding of friction to sketch designs for complex machines over the next two decades. Da Vinci recognised the usefulness and effectiveness of friction and worked the concept into the behaviour of wheels, axles, and pulleys – integral components of his complicated machines.

"Leonardo’s 20-year study of friction, which incorporated his empirical understanding into models for several mechanical systems, confirms his position as a remarkable and inspirational pioneer of tribology," Hutchings said.

Comments

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a tattooed , deep-voiced man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called vivianite (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are from him resting near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals back in January, and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory," says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a...

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging monogamy ), might have a darker side. The love drug also plays an important role in intensifying negative emotional memories and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain forms memories of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors tha...

Aestus Ajith

Search This Blog