ANDREA SEABROOK, host:
The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper - these masterworks of the Renaissance were painted by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci. He is the archetype of what we think of today as a renaissance man. He's infinite curiosity led him to study anatomy, botany, music, sculpture, design and, says writer Fritjof Capra, Leonardo da Vinci was also a great scientist.
Capra is the author of a new book "The Science of Leonardo," inside the mind of the great genius of renaissance.
Hello, Mr. Capra.
Mr. FRITJOF CAPRA (Author, "The Science of Leonardo"): Hello. Thank you for having me on your show.
SEABROOK: Surely. Now, Leonardo da Vinci is now known of course to who've been a great artist, a great mind, but he was not classically trained in science or math? Tell us a brief story.
Mr. CAPRA: No, he was not. But he was classically trained in art and also in engineering. He lived in the time in the 15th century in Florence where there was a great unification of various disciplines. And he was trained in all these disciplines, but he was not trained as a scientist. In fact, he did not go to university and therefore could not speak Latin or Greek. And that was a big hindrance on the one hand, but on the other hand, it allowed him to not be prejudiced by the classical teachings and go to nature herself as he would say to observe nature's systematically.
SEABROOK: Exactly. In your book you write that his lack of classical education freed him.
Mr. CAPRA: That's right. And he often commented on that. And one of my favorite quote is when he said, "When you can go to the well you don't go to the water jag" In other words, you don't need to read the classical texts, which of course he studied also, but you have a more direct access to natural phenomena, and this is what we now called the empirical method of the scientific method which he developed single-handedly 100 years before Galileo who's usually called the father of modern science. So in my view, that honor should really go to Leonardo da Vinci.
SEABROOK: Give it a sense of how the other scientists were approaching their work. What was da Vinci seeing around his that was different?
Mr. CAPRA: Well, not science, of course. In fact, the word science was not use in our sense until the 19th century. Instead of science, they would use natural philosophy. And those philosophers would generally just copy Greeks texts. So Aristotle, of course first of foremost really ruled the day, and then these scholastic philosophers of the middle ages, the Christian theologians fuse Aristotelian philosophy and science with Christian doctrine. And so then any contradiction to Aristotle, any even critical reading of Aristotle was soon as being heretical, and this is the tradition with which Leonardo broke.
SEABROOK: His notebooks are full of clues about how his mind worked. For example, Leonardo da Vinci was preoccupied with motion, he write, especially the flow of water.
Mr. CAPRA: Yes. And that is a science that is now known as hydrodynamics or fluid dynamics that he really created. That did not exist at all. There were a lot of hydraulics engineers especially in Lombardi in northern Italy who were very talented and very knowledgeable about the flow of water. But Leonardo was the only one who made the transition from engineering to science by asking how can I represent the flow of water mathematically? How can I describe it in theoretical models? That was absolutely unheard of.
SEABROOK: So tell me about some of the experiments that he devised to look at water?
Mr. CAPRA: Well, for instance, he did controlled experiments in the laboratory. He designed a glass tank to study turbulent flow and he painted the wall behind it black. And then he poured water into this tank and colored it or put fine grains of millet or straw into it. And these are techniques now known as flow visualization that are still used by scientists today.
SEABROOK: Da Vinci was also interested in patterns that he saw in nature. There are wonderful prints that you include in your book. One is the pattern of rivers on the Earth seen from above?
Mr. CAPRA: Yes.
SEABROOK: And another is the pattern of veins in the human arm.
Mr. CAPRA: Right.
SEABROOK: And they look so much a like.
Mr. CAPRA: Yes. And this actually the main thesis of my book. I present a new interpretation of Leonardo's science as a science of patterns of living forms, of processes of transformation that comes very close, often, to what we now know as the theory of living systems and complexity theory. For him, to know something, all it's meant to relate it to similar patterns in other fields. And this is, by Leonardo, sounds so modern to us.
SEABROOK: One of my favorite parts of your book is where you talk about how his sense of the mystery of life translated into that enigmatic smile that you see in the Mona Lisa.
Mr. CAPRA: Yes. And that is especially true for the later parts of his life -for his old age. That smile appears also in the Saint John and in many other figures in his drawings. And in addition to the smile, we often have a finger pointing heavenwards. So that mysterious smile and that finger pointing into the darkness is Leonardo's acknowledgement that nature, in effect, will always be more complex and more mysterious than our human science can explain
SEABROOK: Fritjof Capra, the author of "The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance."
Sir, thanks very much for speaking with us.
Mr. CAPRA: Thank you.