The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance by Fritjof Capra (PDF)

Description

Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific explorations were virtually unknown during his lifetime, despite their extraordinarily wide range. He studied the flight patterns of birds to create some of the first human flying machines; designed military weapons and defenses; studied optics, hydraulics, and the workings of the human circulatory system; and created designs for rebuilding Milan, employing principles still used by city planners today. Perhaps most importantly, Leonardo pioneered an empirical, systematic approach to the observation of nature-what is known today as the scientific method.Drawing on over 6,000 pages of Leonardo’s surviving notebooks, acclaimed scientist and bestselling author Fritjof Capra reveals Leonardo’s artistic approach to scientific knowledge and his organic and ecological worldview. In this fascinating portrait of a thinker centuries ahead of his time, Leonardo singularly emerges as the unacknowledged “father of modern science.”

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⭐Fritjof Capra notes in his elucidating study on Leonardo, The Science of Leonardo (2007/2008), that the great polymath of the Renaissance was contrary to common belief not a mechanistic thinker, as were later, for example, Francis Bacon or Galileo Galilei, despite the fact that he was one of the first great inventors of modern machines, and actually very interested in machines all his life through. But he did not, as later Cartesian science and philosophers such as La Mettrie or Baron d’Holbach, consider the human body as a machine.The world was used to see Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) as a painter, not a scientist. I questioned this view already at the start of my genius research, about thirty years ago, when I found out about Leonardo’s scientific notebooks. Leonardo and Goethe were the avatars of a new culture, a new society, and yet, at their lifetimes, their breadth of mind and holistic worldview was hardly valued, let alone understood. Goethe had a stable income as a government-employed jurist, Leonardo was doing work for kings and queens, and made a living with construing weapons, but both had their minds focused on what essentially constitutes life, and Leonardo, just as later Albert Einstein, was a genial scientist before he was a great artist. Before the 20th century, both scientists were barely understood. Goethe’s color theory was looked at with suspicion, as it was in flagrant contradiction to Newton’s scientific universe.Leonardo was considered by Herman Grimm, a noted historian, in side remarks of his monograph Life of Michelangelo, as a flamboyant regal person, but also a bohemian and ‘dark soul.’ However, Grimm’s picture of Leonardo lacks personal touch; it is deeply romantic and seems almost sterile. Grimm did not depict, and even less appreciate, the personal identity of the genius but rather painted him as a genus. Needless to add that in his romantic effluvia, Grimm did not lose a world on the scientist Leonardo, and this is all too typical for the general opinion about him before the 20th century.Now, with the study of his scientific genius by Fritjof Capra, Leonardo can eventually be noted by science history as one of the greatest scientific innovators the world has ever seen. He notes in his elucidating study on Leonardo, The Science of Leonardo (2007/2008), that the great polymath of the Renaissance was contrary to common belief not a mechanistic thinker, as were later, for example, Francis Bacon or Galileo Galilei, despite the fact that he was one of the first great inventors of modern machines, and very interested in machines all his life through. But he did not, as later Cartesian science and philosophers such as La Mettrie or Baron d’Holbach, consider the human body as a machine.Capra makes his point convincingly that modern science did not begin with Galilei, but with Leonardo, because it was Leonardo who, for the first time in human history, has applied the scientific method, logic, observation and the capacity to conceptualize a multitude of single data into a single coherent and consistent theory. This was so much the more an achievement as during his lifetime science was still entangled with religion to a point that a large body of the corpus scientia was ecclesiastical doctrine, and as such a mix of mythic views, politically correct assumptions and a residue of observation that was for the largest part taken over from Aristotle.It is highly curious to observe that Leonardo did not formulate, at the onset of his lifelong multidisciplinary research, an intention for so doing; calling himself humbly ‘uomo senza lettere’, an uneducated man, his project was to write a manual on the ‘science of painting.’ His grasp of the world was predominantly visual, and so was his scientific method; it was primarily based upon very accurate and very astute observation of nature and all forms of living. Only a genius can have the abundant curiosity, the intellectual grasp and the persistence to inquire so deeply and so thoroughly from what the eye perceives, to really get to unveil basic laws and functional connections in all living, and in all material life.One may be baffled to see that this magnificent creator was to that point marginalized during his lifetime that none of his notebooks were ever published, worse, as Capra reports, after his death, the collection of his writings and drawings, almost thirteen thousand pages, was scattered and dispersed all over Europe, and stuffed in libraries, instead of having been sorted and properly published; still worse, almost half of the collection was lost.I would like to focus for a moment on one single and in my view significant detail, namely how Leonardo was thinking about ‘life’, about living systems, and about science in relation to life. We are today familiar with the conception of life being not a linear rigid structure that is totally measurable, except when organisms have died, but a nonlinear structure of dynamic patterns, which are essentially relationships. As we have seen, Fritjof Capra has elucidated in his study The Web of Life (1997) that life is basically a structure of ‘networks within networks’ and that hierarchies do exist in nature only in the sense that smaller networks are contained in larger networks but not in the sense of a rigid up-down hierarchy as traditional human society, especially under patriarchy, has conceptualized it as the reigning sociopolitical model.This view is emerging since a few decades and is called the ‘systems view of life’; it is related to deep ecology and Gaia theory and was developed, besides Capra, mainly by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Humberto Maturana, Francisco J. Varela, Ilya Prigogine and Ervin Laszlo.What was known from Goethe’s pantheistic philosophy that considered life as an organic whole, we find it, in Capra’s retrospective, equally with Leonardo.Capra goes as far as talking of Leonardo as ‘a systemic thinker’, because of his strong synthetic thinking ability, that was able to ‘interconnect observations and ideas from different disciplines.’ /5He observes that Leonardo’s visual perception was unusually sharp and accurate, and truly scientific in scope and intent, and that he also had an accurate sense of motion which is seldom to find. Usually, the static eye distorts objects that are in motion. We are hardly aware of this imperfection of our sight as we today are surrounded by visual objects such as televisions, and take high-quality photographs using digital technology. But at a time when there were no photographic plates and cameras, motion was hardly ever depicted by visual artists in a realistic sense; this was simply so as most artists were unable to train their eye to a point to perceive motion correctly, and without distortion of perspective.In addition, Capra notes, Leonardo had a view of the body that preceded quantum physics and modern spirituality. For Leonardo, ‘the human body was an outward and visible expression of the soul; it was shaped by its spirit.’ /5Fritjof Capra notes that Leonardo had an understanding of nature that was basically ecological in the sense that, contrary to what Francis Bacon would advocate a century later, man was not made for dominating nature, but for understanding nature, and based upon that understanding, to cooperate with nature. From this basic worldview, Leonardo was sensible to nature’s complexity and abundance, which was certainly not an attitude commonly to be found at his lifetime. In addition, he was aware of the fallacy of scientific reductionism.I will end my review here for this book is so particular and detailed that I would need to paraphrase too much of Capra’s good and competent narration. This book and his last book so far, which I shall review below, are very great achievements of the writer and scientific thinker Fritjof Capra. His excellent Italian, and his special knowledge even of ancient Italian understandably was extremely helpful to him in perusing—or rather deciphering—Leonardo’s shorthand writing style.

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⭐The history of Leonardo da Vinci is a fascinating subject that Capra brings to life quite effortlessly in his attempt at framing the scientific work of this great artist. In fact, da Vinci was far more a scientist than an artist, and his meticulous obsession with anatomy in his artistic endeavors showcases one of the greatest scientific achievements of any mind.Capra’s enthusiasm for da Vinci is evident in his explanation of da Vinci’s systemic approach to the arts and sciences. Capra, himself, is very much a proponent of integrated systems – an acknowledged supporter of the idea of the interconnectedness of life. Whereas the reductive, mechanistic view of Decartes has dominated the sciences, discoveries in biology and physics over the last few decades have begun to show signs of a paradigm shift towards a more integrated approach. Capra – as a physicist – is on the cutting edge of this approach, so his writing and inferences are not without bias. His excitement and promotion of da Vinci is clearly a mutually promotional effort, but that doesn’t make the book any less enjoyable.Strangely enough, it is the half of the book that biographically details da Vinci’s life and work that becomes the shining strength of this text. Although the latter half’s discourse on da Vinci’s science is informative and compelling, it lacks a lot of the intrigue present in the historical telling of da Vinci’s story. It doesn’t disappoint, but it also doesn’t build upon the momentum of the first half.Regardless of any trivial complaints, Capra’s book is truly a masterpiece on the life and work of one of the greatest minds to ever live and modern science does seem to be slowly incorporating many of this great thinker’s scientific philosophies. One should expect that not long into the future the science of Leonardo da Vinci will be just as heralded as his art.

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⭐Very wordy, interesting but not sufficient drawings of his great inventions and projects.I guess I was looking for a “Da Vinci for dummies”; wanting to glance over his overallwork but also know more about this fascinating man. Not enough bio but I have to recognizethat this book is very well researched. Maybe I’ll find something simpler elsewhere; I likeDa Vinci as a philosopher more than just the inventor; very good book however, Recommended

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⭐Bravo! Capra proves once again that he is a superb writer and meticulous researcher. I believe Leonardo was one of the first to use a logical scientific method of investigation. but this compelling story tells much much more. Next please.

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⭐As described.

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⭐excellent

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⭐impeccable

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