Access Da Vinci’s Thoughts Online
More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci put pen to paper and recorded the future. He invented the tank, the helicopter, the automatic rifle, the diving suit and the parachute. And this was just the tip of his particular iceberg. Da Vinci’s thoughts, diagrams and art were so extraordinary they were considered heretical.
They are now available to view online. 6000 pages of them.
Put together by AI with a committed human hand guiding its progress, the result is an online experience called Inside A Genius Mind. It’s beautifully and simply packaged. You can take a leisurely stroll through the artistic and intellectually-rich pages. Or you can deep dive into each of his codices, demarcated in time spans though his life. His drawings combine the absolutes of mathematics and his informed imagination to create flight and other logic-defying (of the day) flights of fancy.
Amongst all of da Vinci’s thoughts, perhaps the least dramatic but certainly the most profound, is the Vitruvian Man, which geometrically proves that the human body is the perfectly proportionate life form. This has provided much weaponry in arguments that promote divinity intervention, and offer just as much fervent belief that no such intervention existed.
His conclusions about humankind and our yet-to-be harnessed engineering skill are astounding. And there will be long periods of time when browsing the codices that you won’t be aware your mouth has been hanging open.
After a while, you’ll also realise that the writing was encrypted in several different ways. Obviously to prevent Leonardo losing his head, testicles or whatever punishment was popular when defying church or state or both.
It turns out we have the much-maligned Bill Gates to thank for this new vision into the past, who purchased some of the codex material two years ago.
A Bridge Between Past and Future
I have to admit, after looking at da Vinci’s Arundel Codex, I started to wonder about the prejudices we often have against predictions proffered today about the future. Predictions solidly grounded in theory. Fear of change? Fear of loss of control? Heaven knows, I am as guilty as anyone of ridiculing things through ignorance. But then I revert to a quote by Arthur C. Clarke, whose short story The Sentinel inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This tends to prise my mind open again.
So go take a walk through da Vinci’s mind. And see the rabbits he pulled out of the hat 500 years ago.
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