WOAH: Engineer Uncovers Huge Physics Discovery in Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Irrelevant Scribbles’

Kind of makes you wonder what secrets are hiding in the notebook of Leonardo da Vinci’s journal that billionaire Bill Gates paid over $30 million for…

Via Collective Evolution:

The notebook, which contains the  page of seemingly meaningless scribbles penned in red chalk on a piece of yellow scrap paper back in 1493, is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum of London. The page in question was already the subject of academic debate years ago, regarding, in particular, the faint sketch of an old woman near the top, with the statement “cosa bella mortal passa e non dura,” which translates to “mortal beauty passes and does not last.” Beneath these works lay the sketches that were dismissed by a 1920s museum director as “irrelevant notes and diagrams in red chalk.”

Nevertheless, nearly a century later, Hutchings stirred up discussion on that very page once again, as 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. This is the exact kind of experiment students would conduct today to show how the laws of friction work.

“The sketches and text show Leonardo understood the fundamentals of friction in 1493,” explains Hutchings. “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.”

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