Leonardo da Vinci May Have Discovered Gravity Long Before Galileo, Newton and Einstein

Recent research from the California Institute of Technology looked at long-forgotten diagrams in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, illustrating tests from the early 1500s of particles falling from a pitcher, proving gravity is a sort of acceleration. According to a statement from the university, these notebooks have now been digitalized and show Da Vinci’s understanding of gravity. Sir Isaac Newton didn’t develop a law of universal gravitation, describing how objects are attracted to one another, until the late 17th century. Galileo Galilei first proposed in 1604 that the distance a falling object covered was proportional to the square of time elapsed.
In several of da Vinci’s drawings, particles spilling out of a pitcher and moving in a straight line parallel to the ground produce triangles. In these experiments, da Vinci discovered that the falling material creates a vertical line if the pitcher moves at a constant speed, but a slanted line if the pitcher accelerates at a constant rate. This slanted line is the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle formed between the start and end points of the falling material. Da Vinci named this phenomenon the “Equatione di Moti,” which translates to “equalisation (equivalence) of motions.”
The team replicated the error made by da Vinci centuries ago when modelling the water vase tests and concluded that Da Vinci was far ahead of his time in understanding the concept of gravity. The journal Leonardo published their findings on February 1 and the original experiment plans can be found in the Codex Arundel, a collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s writings.