ac Newton’s (created in 1669 and presented to the Royal Society in the following two years) and William Herschel’s (1780). He also presented the quote from Leonardo:
“As I propose to treat of the nature of the moon, it is necessary that first I should describe the perspective of mirrors, whether plane, concave or convex; and first what is meant by a luminous ray, and how it is refracted by various kinds of media; then, when a reflected ray is most powerful, whether when the angle of incidence is acute, right, or obtuse, or from a convex, a plane, or a concave surface; or from an opaque or a transparent body.”
Elsewhere, Leonardo adds, “It is possible to find means by which the eye shall not see remote objects as much diminished as in natural perspective… and so the moon will be seen larger and its spots of a more defined form.”
Professor Buys includes many of Leonardo’s drawings from a variety of Leonardo Codices — ray diagrams based on experiments on reflection of light from flat and concave surfaces, of designs for machines and tools for polishing flat and concave mirrors, and an apparatus that resembles a modern battlefield weapon, the mortar, but one that can just as easily be a reflecting telescope. The latter is the instrument that Professor Buys created from bronze. The holes at the base, he speculated, might just have been to hold a variety of magnifying glasses, effectively the “eye-pieces” of telescopes. We should add that Leonardo left behind a drawing of a howitzer, shown lobbing shells in parabolic trajectories, but the apparatus is considerably heavier in design.
Buys includes some of Leonardo cosmological pronouncements, including a rejection of the Ptolemaic earth-centered universe, and recognition of universal gravitation:
“The earth is not in the center of the Sun’s orbit, nor at the center of the universe, but in the center of its companion elements, and united with them.” — Leonardo
“The sun does move.”
“Gravity is limited to the elements of water and earth; but this force is unlimited, and by 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