The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance [Paperback]

Fritjof Capra (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2008

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.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Capra, author of the classic The Tao of Physics, makes the case in this fascinating intellectual biography for the great artist Leonardo being the unsung father of modern science. Drawing on approximately 6,000 pages and 100,000 drawings surviving from Leonardo's scattered notebooks, Capra explores the groundbreaking research of this quintessential Renaissance man. Illegitimate, born in a Tuscan village in 1452, Leonardo did not receive a classical education, a fact that, Capra notes, later freed him from the intellectual conventions of his time and allowed him to develop his own holistic, empirical approach to science. Apprenticed with Verrocchio in Florence around the age of 15, Leonardo became an independent artist when he was 25, but his intellectual appetites demanded more. He taught himself Latin and began the famous notebooks, a record of his artistic and scientific explorations. The recurring patterns he saw in nature led him to create what Capra calls a science of wholeness, of movement and transformation. Capra expresses his own intellectual kinship with Leonardo's multidisciplinary perspective on science, one that recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all natural phenomena—a view he sees as particularly relevant today. Illus. (Oct. 30)
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Review

“Minutely researched, vividly written, and endlessly fascinating, The Science of Leonardo opens up a realm which has never been adequately appreciated.” —Dr. Oliver Sacks“Illuminating and impassioned . . . . A profound and clear exploration of Leonardo's scientific thought.”—The San Francisco Chronicle“A delight . . . . Lucid and spirited, it sparks a whole series of ideas and questions for further investigation.”—American Scientist“A fascinating glimpse of the road not taken by Western Science. Capra makes a compelling case that the science of the future may look a lot more like Leonardo's than Bacon's or Descartes -- a science of systems, non-reductive and akin to an art.” —Michael Pollan, author of Botany of Desire and Omnivore's Dilemma“Vivid and compelling. . . . Leonardo himself would have nodded in approval of this book, because for the first time it crystallizes the entire body of his work into a coherent, unified whole.” —Michio Kaku, author of Physics of the Impossible

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (December 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400078830
• ISBN-13: 978-1400078837
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.8 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #286,404 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Multifarious Man, November 30, 2007

By 

Jeremy Mates (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Hardcover)

Fritjof Capra provides fascinating insight into Leonardo da Vinci, his life, and his many accomplishments. No special knowledge is assumed: all terms, such as sfumato and chiaroscuro, are well defined. The Greek and Latin schools of thought are introduced, and how Leonardo variously accepted, rejected, or improved upon this body of knowledge.

Particular attention is paid to Leonardo's methods, a man so interested in the process and underlying principals as to be a renowned sculptor in his time without a sculpture, one who left a trail of magnificent (yet variously incomplete) artwork. Leonardo asked not just "how", but also "why", and tested these questions with detailed experiments in many fields: optics, anatomy, and fluid dynamics, to name a few.

The text does repeat itself, though like a arabesque rope, repeats back on the core strengths of Leonardo, and shows in turn how these strengths allowed Leonardo to advance the fields of art, science, and engineering. Highly recommended.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good biography of da vinci's life and thought, January 29, 2008

By 

Dan Arias (Santa Cruz, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Hardcover)

I heard of this book during an interview of the author on NPR. The interview was fascinating and motivated me to get the book.

The book is wonderful for its balance and grace. It is a concise telling of da Vinci's life and his thinking gleaned from his manuscripts and from contemporary writers. It is interesting to discover that little is known about da Vinci's personal or inner life. However, we discover that da Vinci was truly one of the first scientists in the modern sense, predating Galileo. His gifts for observation, illustration, and painting combined with his energy and enthusiasm for experimentation led him to discoveries and conclusions that would not be widely recognized for centuries.

It was a good inspiring read! I'm looking forward to reading Capra's book on systemic thinking.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A disappointing book, doesn't live up to its title, January 2, 2010

By 

D. Dobkin (Sunnyvale, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Paperback)

This book was a disappointment. The title leads the reader to believe that we will see a detailed exposition of contributions made (at least potentially) by da Vinci, but actually very little of the volume is devoted to such examination. The first half is a fairly interesting but overly long biography of the great man, more focused on his art than his science; and the discussion of the artistic work is mostly about the use of color, not helped by grayscale reproductions of the paintings! The second half, which purports to detail his scientific contributions, is all too often a rehash of the first half, telling us that he was really smart without providing any demonstration of the fact.

For a book about a man whose greatest talent was his ability to draw, it is woefully under-illustrated. Few pages from his voluminous notebooks are reproduced, and when they are, the pages are unannotated. This is absurd: the text is mirror-written Italian and illegible anyway in the reduced-size reproductions, and without it the drawings are mysterious in many cases.

The text is full of unsupported claims about Leonardo's discoveries; the few that are examined in sufficient detail don't really jibe with Capra's summaries. For example, Capra represents Leonardo as having discovered that light is a wave; the detailed text shows that he had in fact made the remarkably astute assertion that sound is a wave phenomenon, but did not grasp the importance of frequency or wavelength in determining perceived pitch. Capra gives no example of Leonardo exhibiting the essential properties of waves -- phase, wavelength, interference -- in discussions of light. Leonardo worked with geometric optics, which doesn't require that the underlying phenomenon be wavelike.

Similarly, he is described as having discovered the reason the sky is blue, but a more careful examination of Leonardo's remarks shows that he got only half the problem right: he correctly understood that the particles of "moisture" (actually the individual atoms) in the air are scattering incoming solar radiation, but since he didn't understand the impact of frequency on color, he could not and did not grasp that this scattering was wavelength-dependent (the 'blue' part).

The book has some gems, for Leonardo was of course a remarkable man, but all too often we have Capra reading into Leonardo's work 20th century science that either isn't there or is not demonstrated to be there. Someone will have to write a better book so that we can more fully and correctly appreciate the great man's work.

Just for completeness, I hold advanced degrees in applied physics, and have written some technical books, so my expectations for content may be a bit different from most readers!