What could Leonardo da Vinci build with a modern physics book?

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:01]Oh, hello there. Leonardo da Vinci was a great engineer, scientist, draftsman, theorist, sculptor, architect, and single-handedly created probably the most famous painting ever. A rare polymath indeed. Combine every smart and/or talented person whose name ends in O. And that's what we're dealing with. Leonardo was born in, you guessed it, Vinci, Italy on April 15th, 1452.

[00:00:25]Long enough ago to where the Roman Empire still existed. He wasn't Roman at all though as he lived in what used to be the Western Roman Empire and only the Eastern Empire still existed in his time. But even that finally fell for good before he could even say the word Renaissance.

[00:00:41]We know very little about his personal life as almost none of his thousands of pages of notes mention anything about it. Though one guy did describe him as having infinite grace and there's a story about him and some friends one time getting busted with a prostitute.

[00:00:56]Hey fellas, ILLEGAL.

[00:00:59]>> LUCKILY, one of the friends's dad was a high-ranking politician who got the charges swept under the rug. Some things never change. Anyway, in addition to all this stuff, he made discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodnamics, geology, optics, and tribology without even publishing those findings cuz Brill was just that good.

[00:01:18]In his day, science and art were basically the same subject, and physics didn't really exist at all. So, a modern physics book would teach him about heat, light, force, atoms, electricity, magnetism, sound, gravity, inertia, and friction. Most of which was still hundreds of years from being discovered during his time. Earlier, I said nothing about him being good at math, and that's cuz he wasn't. He had less formal training in it than a modern kindergartener, meaning none. He did teach himself some math, mostly geometry, in order to do even better drawings and simple calculations for his inventions, though. But even if he were a math genius for his day, he would still know very little compared to today's standards. As the most advanced maths known at his time were algebra and geometry, Isaac Newton was still 200 years away from inventing calculus.

[00:02:03]Jerk. So, but it would take Leonardo a hot minute to learn all about calculus, vectors, trigonometry, differential equations, statistics.

[00:02:13]>> Talk about a long night of homework.

[00:02:15]Yesesh. Physics covers a huge range of aspects and it would take just a million volumes of books to cover everything there is to know. So, the book I'll choose to go back in time and leave on his desk will be Physics for the Inquiring Mind by Eric Rogers. This is a pretty general physics book that doesn't go into too much complexity in math, which is good cuz even the most simple concepts will be way past Leo's knowledge. So, good stuff. It also explains how to think and reason the way modern physicists do. And this alone would be huge. Instead of Leo's brain just spitting ideas onto paper, he could start to follow a systematic process to test his ideas. And no, this book is not sponsored, but I did put a link to buy a copy in the description if you're interested. Without further ado, let's go over the four biggest advancements Leonardo da Vinci could have made with this modern physics book.

[00:03:06]Magnification. This may appear trivial at first, but seeing things too small for the human eye is possibly the most important thing Leonardo could have done. As it turns out, Anthony Van Leewenhook was the first person to make a microscope and see microorganisms and cells in the 1670s. This laid the groundwork for germ theory, and he was able to shoot down the idea of spontaneous generation. Yes, people at the time thought that vital heat from mud and decaying meat spontaneously created critters like flies and mice simply because those creatures usually happen to be around gross stuff. Talk about needing the scientific method.

[00:03:42]Now, by Leonardo's time, glass had been around for millennia. Glasses for centuries. Leo had already invented a machine for grinding convex mirrors.

[00:03:50]He'd built camera obscuras. He'd dissected eyeballs. and he knew about light reflection and refraction, which is only one step above what birds know about light, but that's not nothing. So Rogers's book gives him focal length, refraction laws, lens combinations, and magnification formulas. Seeing microorganisms and blood cells would have blown Leonardo's mind. And since Leonardo already understood a ton about anatomy, he would have made huge advancements in biology. Discovering cells and bacteria could have helped him learn more about life than he ever would have thought possible and would have brought about better hospitals and medicine much sooner. Pointing his curved glass toward the heavens would have also been game-changing. At this time, they still believed in Tomy's geocentrism, meaning the earth was the center of the universe type of baloney.

[00:04:33]Capernicus' heliocentric model was still decades away, and Galileo didn't improve on the telescope until6009, 90 years after Leonardo's death. With some improvements to his glass, Leo could have been the first person to see Jupiter's moons, Saturn's rings, the sun's spots, and possibly most importantly, Venus's phases. This would have had a huge indirect consequence for technological progression since this is the stuff of his royal papacy's nightmares, as it was the first proof that Venus orbits the sun and not the Earth, forcing the church to stop scientific repression eventually.

[00:05:13]flight. Leonardo already designed gliders and not one but two kinds of opters. His problem certainly wasn't imagination. It was aerodynamics. Sure, he had an understanding of leverage, center of gravity, friction and load paths. But the physics book would give him lift versus drag, center of mass, center of pressure, air foils, energy and momentum, and stability. But even with all this knowledge, he still wouldn't have been able to produce powered flight. plan out cuz people were nowhere near being able to build any sort of combustion engine yet like the Wright brothers used four centuries later. What he could build was non-deadly gliders. Something like Otto Lillianthal's very comfortable looking 1890s glider and maybe a primitive parachute that actually works. Something Otto himself perhaps should have looked into. Perfecting a glider would still lay very important groundwork though. It wouldn't be long before engines would be built. And as soon as more efficient power came along, these gliders would be ready for engines to be slapped on them for real powered flight.

[00:06:14]Steam engines. FYI, steam engines are incredibly inefficient and heavy, which is why he couldn't power one of his gliders with one. But he could build the first car or maybe train. Our brilliant whippers snapper had already sketched a piston-like steam cannon, pressure vessels, and early concepts of boilers.

[00:06:31]The physics book gives them info on energy conservation, pressure, work, heat, mechanical advantage, and how to convert heat to motion. In reality, the first steam powered car was built in 1769 by Nicholas Joseph Kunat. Leonardo certainly could have built something like this and then kept improving on it.

[00:06:48]He could also build steam pumps, steam powered mills, steam powered refrigerators, >> all the steam.

[00:06:54]>> Leaving the Renaissance in the dust and jumping straight into the industrial revolution in 1500.

[00:07:03]electricity. Being able to produce static electricity was pretty much the extent of the knowledge of electricity in the 1500s. Leonardo had studied magnets and created some of his own static electricity, but he had no idea those two things were connected or how in the living green earth they worked.

[00:07:20]Our physics book would teach him about charge, current, circuits, magnetism, and show simple experiments. Okay, Leo, you ready to make some simple radios and light bulbs? Sonor Pranto. Well, you can't. A sad pandas. Best he could do in his lifetime would be a simple telegraph system and maybe an electrostatic generator. Without insulated wire, vacuums, and good tungsten filaments, he won't be able to catch live broadcasts of Henry the VI's wives' executions on a cathode ray tube TV. But his grandchildren would be able to. Oh, wait. Leo never had any kids. Doubles pandas. Leonardo da Vinci once said, "The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art." And the coolest people will subscribe to the mic stuff and like this video. I can't do accents. There's a ton more he could have done. As in real life, he was also designing diving suits, war machines, and musical instruments. But without better metal energy, precision instruments, and the chemical industry, he couldn't have just jumped straight to the modern age in his lifetime. Humans would have kept improving after his death though and by now we'd be living on Proxima B if this actually happened.

[00:08:25]Neil Degrasse Tyson is seething right now over all the reasons Proxima B is inhabitable for human