Thinking of the effect on speed of things falling down as acceleration (as opposed to constant), and even coming up with a formula, is already a bridge between these two things.
The insight of da Vinci’s here is anticipating Newton, not Einstein. And yes, this is already an accomplishment, but not the outlandish one the article would imply.
I don't think that's quite what Whig history is. The Wikipedia article doesn't seem to imply that, either. If there was a "Tory history", I think this case would be more like that, as it presents a past figure as being more enlightened (while Whig history typically does the opposite in order to extol progress).
Looking a little further into the article, I see it mentions a whig history of science that ignores failed theories and dead ends, and I would agree that this is not the same as attributing successful theories to people who probably did not hold them, though the latter does also tend to present science in 'march of progress' terms.
The idea that the Galileo in being the first to formalise an equation for precise calculation of acceleration was by extension the first in history to conceptualise that acceleration occurs at all is a severe infantalisation of all scientists who preceded him.
Extending this: the Whig story on contemporary science (sp. as it affects policy) is that this is the best science because scientists have been improving it forever, while the conservative story is that maybe the scientists are wrong now, they’ve so often been wrong in the past.
states it more clearly
"... a characteristic of that kind of historical writing in which the author seeks antecedents of present-day institutions or ideas in earlier historical periods. This kind of anachronism is considered to be a form of Whig history ..."
He was millennia ahead of his time, and I personally believe he had an understanding of physics but was existing in a time where the tools available to his understanding were what was lacking.
This guy predicted eddy-based hydrodynamic in the cardio vascular system before "human biology" was considered a science.
Look at da vinci's designs for the eddy-hydro-pump system...
Maybe he was a time traveling engineer who needed to plant seeds of knowledge in our past on this timeline to ensure advancement and growth of Humanity.
That seems extremely unlikely, but we won't find out for at least 1500 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gravitational_theor...
That's an interesting article, including some challenges to Aristotle's views and gravity-related concepts introduced by Indian and Islamic scholars of the 6th - 12th century eras or so.
Isn't that a core problem with Wikipedia? I don't understand why its reputation on HN improved, a few years ago, from 'infotainment but a symbol of mis-/disinformation' to 'source of truth'.
This sounds like a gross misinterpretation of what Einstein said.
Einstein's great insight was that gravity defines inertial (i.e. non-accelerated) frames of reference. Put differently, in free fall you are not in an accelerated frame, despite what an outside observer on the surface of Earth might say. This is commonly abbreviated by "All massive bodies follow the same (inertial) trajectories in the presence of gravity, irrespective of their constitution", which is the Equivalence Principle.
What you are maybe referring to is what an observer experiences who stands still on the surface of a massive body: They can't free-fall, and so they're not in an inertial frame (= the thing defined by gravity) and thus actually accelerate upwards from the point of view of spacetime.
> we ... assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system
Otherwise, as outlined in my previous comment, it does not make any sense.
Da Vinci certainly appears to be exploring the former. The latter was Einstein's great insight. I don't see much in the article to persuade me that da Vinci was equating gravity and acceleration in the way Einstein did, and so the title seems a little too suggestive.