 it infinite worlds might be moved if instruments could be made by which the force could be generated.” — Leonardo
Finally, Buys draws his own conclusions:
• “Leonardo had the knowledge and skills to make a telescope. He used a telescope to enlarge the image of the moon. The optical quality was, however, poor and he did not discover the craters on the moon.”
• “Leonardo’s telescope anticipated most of the later inventions, including Newton’s and Herschel’s… ”
His final observation uttered with modesty and caution, “Atalay’s ‘mortar gun’ could have been Leonardo’s Herschellian telescope, but the evidence is not conclusive.”
A suspicious circular smudge appears in the lower right hand sector of the moon. It is the Crater Tycho, invisible to the naked eye. This could be among the more compelling pieces in the puzzle about whether Leonardo had in fact been the first inventor of the telescope.
Leonardo died on 2 May, 1519 in Amboise, France. His patron during the last three years of his life had been Francis I, King of France.
The Scientific Revolution
Historians regard the Scientific Revolution as having been launched by the publication in 1543 of a pair of seminal books — Copernicus’s De revolutionibus and Vesalius’s de humani corporis fabrica. The former, De revolutionibus, introduced a new paradigm for our physical location in the cosmos. Presented initially as a hypothesis, Copernicus’s heliocentric picture, in distinction to the prevailing geocentric, wrested the center of the universe from the earth and placed it in the sun. The latter ushered in scientific anatomical studies, and gave rise to the new field of comparative anatomy, and ultimately revolutionized medicine.
Three decades before the publication of either book, Leonardo (1452-1519) had anticipated many of the developments that would be associated with the Scientific Revolution. He had created anatomical drawings superior to those of Vesalius, and made statements seemingly prefiguring Darwinian evolution. He had performed fundamental studies in optics, and left notes with compelling evidence he had even experimented with both the refracting telescope and the reflector (The Tycho Crater on the moon, invisible to the naked eye, is seen in one of his drawings. Since none of his discoveries were published in his time, and indeed since 75-80% of his papers were lost permanently within a generation or two after his death, his works would not stimulate future development in the sciences. The tragedy of the paragon Renaissance man, universal genius Leonardo, is that although he was in the business of inventing the future, he would not be influencing the future. His scientific endeavors have to be regarded as a false start to the Scientific Revolution.
For most of the slides in this blog and the drama of the discovery, I am deeply indebted to Prof. André Buys, nuclear engineer, amateur telescope maker and scientific sleuth extraordinaire, whom I first met in 2005, and then again in 2010.