The article “Leonardo da Vinci’s Visualization of Gravity as a Form of Acceleration,” published in the aptly named journal Leonardo (peer-reviewed, MIT Press Direct), has gained some fame, as it has appeared in many news articles. The authors claim that Leonardo understood gravity almost as well as Newton, and even suggest that he anticipated Einstein’s equivalence principle. José María González Ondina presents a more likely interpretation, based on Leonardo’s own manuscripts, that negates these incredible claims.
The future is uncertain, a bit spooky, possibly dangerous, maybe wonderful. We cope with this never-ending uncertainty by telling stories about the future: future stories. How do we construct those stories? Where is the future, the place where we set those stories? Can we trust our future stories? And what sort of futures do they show us? David Christian is renowned for pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the whole of the past. In this conversation, he…
Chris Edwards reviews John Gribbin’s definitive work on Einstein and his intellectual process: Einstein’s Masterwork: 1915 and the General Theory of Relativity (2017. New York/London: Pegasus Books).
Chris Edwards reviews John Gribbin’s definitive work on Einstein and his intellectual process: Einstein’s Masterwork: 1915 and the General Theory of Relativity (2017. New York/London: Pegasus Books).
In 2016, the National Science Foundation made a thrilling announcement: gravitational waves—first predicted by Einstein as part of his general theory of relativity in 1916—had been detected for the first time. Astrophysicist Dr. Janna Levin tells the epic story of the scientific campaign to record these waves — the holy grail of modern cosmology.
