Part One:
‘Geniuses’ with clay feet?
‘Geniuses’ with clay feet?
by
“Da Vinci is universally hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of all time. He is celebrated for his art, inventions, science, and being multi-talented.
Leonardo da Vinci is the most overrated genius of all time mainly because of the many outlandish claims made about how much of a genius he was”.
Introduction
By way of complete contrast with the standard assessment of the so-often compared Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci, that goes along lines such as this (https://www.createspace.com/4430132):
Archimedes and Leonardo Da Vinci: The Greatest Geniuses of Antiquity and the Renaissance
Authored by Charles River Editors
….
“Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world.’"– Archimedes
“Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.” – Leonardo
Over 1500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci became the Renaissance Man, antiquity had its own in the form of Archimedes, one of the most famous Ancient Greeks. An engineer, mathematician, physicist, scientist and astronomer all rolled into one, Archimedes has been credited for making groundbreaking discoveries, some of which are undoubtedly fact and others that are almost certainly myth. Regardless, he’s considered the first man to determine a way to measure an object’s mass, and also the first man to realize that refracting the Sun’s light could burn something, theorizing the existence of lasers over two millennia before they existed. People still use the design of the Archimedes screw in water pumps today, and modern scholars have tried to link him to the recently discovered Antikythera mechanism, an ancient “computer” of sorts that used mechanics to accurately chart astronomical data depending on the date it was set to.
“Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.” – Leonardo
Over 1500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci became the Renaissance Man, antiquity had its own in the form of Archimedes, one of the most famous Ancient Greeks. An engineer, mathematician, physicist, scientist and astronomer all rolled into one, Archimedes has been credited for making groundbreaking discoveries, some of which are undoubtedly fact and others that are almost certainly myth. Regardless, he’s considered the first man to determine a way to measure an object’s mass, and also the first man to realize that refracting the Sun’s light could burn something, theorizing the existence of lasers over two millennia before they existed. People still use the design of the Archimedes screw in water pumps today, and modern scholars have tried to link him to the recently discovered Antikythera mechanism, an ancient “computer” of sorts that used mechanics to accurately chart astronomical data depending on the date it was set to.
It has long been difficult to separate fact from legend in the story of Archimedes’ life, from his death to his legendary discovery of how to differentiate gold from fool’s gold, but many of his works survived antiquity, and many others were quoted by other ancient writers. As a result, even while his life and death remain topics of debate, his writings and measurements are factually established and well known, and they range on everything from measuring an object’s density to measuring circles and parabolas.
is the following cheeky view, which ranks Leonardo da Vinci as the most over-rated of geniuses (https://itsnobody.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/the-top-10-most-overrated-geniuses/):
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The Top 10 Most Overrated “Geniuses”
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Here is my top 10 list of the most overrated geniuses. The rankings are based upon how overrated the “geniuses” starting from the lesser overrated geniuses ending with the most overrated genius.
#10 – Bill Gates
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#9 – James D. Watson
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#8 – Michio Kaku
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#7 – Stephen Hawking
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#6 – William James Sidis
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#5 – Benjamin Franklin
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#4 – Thomas Edison
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#3 – Albert Einstein
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Damien Mackey’s comment: On Einstein, see also my series of articles:
“Anxious theologians scan the latest scientific theories to see if they do or do not support the existence of God. Grave scientists issue their pontifical pronouncements. Sir James Jeans tells us that God is a great mathematician; Einstein says ‘God is slick but not mean’; Laplace, answering Napoleon who taxed him with not mentioning God in his Mécanique Céleste, said: ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’.”
GAVIN ARDLEY, Aquinas and Kant
"Difficulties of a common sense and philosophical nature are frequently encountered in the acceptance of fundamentally new principles of physics, as e.g. on the introduction of relativity and quantum theories. These difficulties should not be experienced henceforth when it is realised that, in spite of misleading terms, the physical principles are not about the real world which we know so well. The physicist should become more conscious of the power he possesses to mould his subject when he is fully aware of his autonomy".
Now, continuing with the count-down of supposed geniuses we arrive at no. 2:
#2 – Pythagoras of Samos
Damien Mackey’s comment: On Pythagoras, see my articles:
Continuing with the count-down of supposed geniuses we arrive at no. 1:
#1 – Leonardo da Vinci
So who’s the most super-overrated genius of all time? It’s Leonardo da Vinci.
Da Vinci is universally hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of all time. He is celebrated for his art, inventions, science, and being multi-talented.
Leonardo da Vinci is the most overrated genius of all time mainly because of the many outlandish claims made about how much of a genius he was.
Many different sources have “estimated” Da Vinci’s IQ to be over 200. This however is quite impossible. It’s literally impossible that Da Vinci had an IQ of 200+. Whenever asked for legitimate reasons as to how Da Vinci could of [sic] had an IQ of 200+ people will usually respond with an appeal to authority saying something like “this expert said so” or “this person said so”.
Da Vinci himself said “Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory”.
In order to correctly estimate IQ you have to estimate how well someone would be able to answer the most difficult IQ-style questions.
I know that Da Vinci’s IQ would not be any higher than 160 based on some simple observations:
– At least half of Da Vinci’s inventions failed when tested, this does not show high IQ at all
– Da Vinci tried to learn mathematics but didn’t really get very far
– Da Vinci was not a super-fast learner (the main sign of high IQ)
– Da Vinci’s works do not require a high IQ
– Da Vinci tried to learn mathematics but didn’t really get very far
– Da Vinci was not a super-fast learner (the main sign of high IQ)
– Da Vinci’s works do not require a high IQ
Nothing Da Vinci did demonstrates that he had an IQ of 200 or higher or even close to that. Da Vinci is so overrated that people think his IQ was higher than Newton’s. But how could that be possible? Newton did things like solving the brachistochrone problem in a few hours, but what did Leonardo da Vinci do to demonstrate his intelligence? I would be surprised if Da Vinci had an IQ higher than 140.
Da Vinci’s inventions have also been grossly exaggerated. Da Vinci drew drawings and different people have personally interpreted some of the same drawings to mean different things. This has been the case with Da Vinci’s supposed calculator. Objectors once again claim this device wouldn’t actually work and isn’t actually a drawing of a calculator, but people personally interpret it to be so.
This is also the case with Da Vinci’s supposed helicopter. It’s not really a helicopter, it’s just an aerial screw. Helicopters are closer to Chinese bamboo toys than they are to Da Vinci’s sketches. The media and others simply overrated Da Vinci so much they decided to call it a helicopter (some how).
Da Vinci never actually built or tested most of his inventions and at least half of them failed when tested. The vast majority of the models of Da Vinci’s designs that really do work are modified versions of Da Vinci’s designs or strange interpretations of what Da Vinci’s designs mean. In order to get most of Da Vinci’s designs to work modifications are necessary.
The more people test out Da Vinci’s designs the more people find that his designs don’t work. What’s genius about coming up with failed designs? Basically anyone who has artistic talent, an IQ of 130 or higher, and spends all their time focusing on inventing new machines would be able to come up with lots of inventions (and having half of them fail).
Da Vinci being far ahead of his time is also an exaggerated claim. Da Vinci was born in the year 1452 AD, not the year 287 BC like Archimedes. Basically everything Da Vinci had done had been independently re-discovered without much effort by others within 200 years or less or had been done prior to Da Vinci. Since at least half of Da Vinci’s designs didn’t work I’m not sure how much it would have mattered if Da Vinci’s writings had been discovered much earlier. During Da Vinci’s time being ahead of your time didn’t take much.
Al-Jazari for instance pre-dates Da Vinci by more than 200 years, he invented one of the first programmable analog computers, camshaft, segmented gears, and more. His book is much more detailed than Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, all of his designs work, and even though he pre-dates Da Vinci he is completely ignored in the media.
[End of quote]
This rater of genius does not question Archimedes, however, here considered to have been an ancient “super-genius”: “Or what about the super-genius engineer and mathematician Archimedes, who pre-dates Da Vinci by more than 1600 years. He is also ignored in the media”.
However, I have had cause to question the very historicity of this Archimedes, about whom so very little is really known. I have gone so far to suggest, in my article:
King Hezekiah and the strong Fort of Lachish. Part Two: Akhi-miti’s short tenure
that ‘Archimedes’ may actually have arisen from a person of earlier ancient history (c. 700 BC), Akhimiti (the biblical high priest, Eliakim), who survived several sieges by the Assyrians. Moreover, the water screw invention, falsely attributed to Archimedes, was already known to the Assyrians of the very era of Akhimiti. Thus I wrote:
Archimedes
Did the Greeks appropriate the C8th BC official, Akhi-miti, and re-cast him as Archimedes, about whom “… very little is known about the early life of Archimedes or his family”? http://archimedespalimpsest.org/about/history/archimedes.php - and, about whom there are “… many fantastic tales surrounding the life of Archimedes”.
Given that Stephanie Dalley has now proved that the water screw, thought to have been invented by Archimedes, was in use as early as the time of King Sennacherib of Assyria (“Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw”: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/40151), we have to be very doubtful, I think, of the historical reality of this Archimedes.
Famed for his supposedly having held off the besieging Romans, this may be just another of the many legends that have arisen from the historical dramas at the time of King Hezekiah of Judah, at both of which Eliakim (= Akhi-miti?) was present: namely Sennacherib’s aborted siege of Jerusalem, and the later siege by the Assyrian army as recorded in the Book of Judith.
[End of quote]
If my estimation of Archimedes is correct, then this would make ‘him’ a most unsuitable model for comparison with Leonardo da Vinci, whether the latter be considered genius or not.
Part Two:
“Over 1500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci became the Renaissance Man, antiquity had its own in the form of Archimedes, one of the most famous Ancient Greeks”.
If Leonardo da Vinci has been modelled to some degree upon a possibly fictitious Archimedes (refer back to Part One), then how much of what we have about Leonardo is truly reliable?
Or, to put it another way, we might ask: What is the real Da Vinci Code?
The two names, Archimedes and Leonardo, are constantly found mentioned together.
For instance, there is this article, “Archimedes and Leonardo Da Vinci: The Greatest Geniuses of Antiquity and the Renaissance” (https://www.createspace.com/4430132):
Authored by Charles River Editors
….
“Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world.’"– Archimedes
“Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.” – Leonardo
Over 1500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci became the Renaissance Man, antiquity had its own in the form of Archimedes, one of the most famous Ancient Greeks. An engineer, mathematician, physicist, scientist and astronomer all rolled into one, Archimedes has been credited for making groundbreaking discoveries, some of which are undoubtedly fact and others that are almost certainly myth. Regardless, he’s considered the first man to determine a way to measure an object’s mass, and also the first man to realize that refracting the Sun’s light could burn something, theorizing the existence of lasers over two millennia before they existed. People still use the design of the Archimedes screw in water pumps today, and modern scholars have tried to link him to the recently discovered Antikythera mechanism, an ancient “computer” of sorts that used mechanics to accurately chart astronomical data depending on the date it was set to.
It has long been difficult to separate fact from legend in the story of Archimedes’ life, from his death to his legendary discovery of how to differentiate gold from fool’s gold, but many of his works survived antiquity, and many others were quoted by other ancient writers. As a result, even while his life and death remain topics of debate, his writings and measurements are factually established and well known, and they range on everything from measuring an object’s density to measuring circles and parabolas.
The Renaissance spawned the use of the label “Renaissance Man” to describe a person who is extremely talented in multiple fields, and no discussion of the Renaissance is complete without the original “Renaissance Man”, Leonardo da Vinci. Indeed, if 100 people are asked to describe Leonardo in one word, they might give 100 answers. As the world’s most famous polymath and genius, Leonardo found time to be a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer.
It would be hard to determine which field Leonardo had the greatest influence in. His “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper” are among the most famous paintings of all time, standing up against even Michelangelo’s work. But even if he was not the age’s greatest artist, Leonardo may have conducted his most influential work was done in other fields. His emphasis on the importance of Nature would influence Enlightened philosophers centuries later, and he sketched speculative designs for gadgets like helicopters that would take another 4 centuries to create. Leonardo’s vision and philosophy were made possible by his astounding work as a mathematician, engineer and scientist. At a time when much of science was dictated by Church teachings, Leonardo studied geology and anatomy long before they truly even became scientific fields, and he used his incredible artistic abilities to sketch the famous Vitruvian Man, linking art and science together.
[End of quote]
Then there is this one by D. L. Simms, “Archimedes' Weapons of War and Leonardo” (BJHS, 1988, 21, pp. 195-210): https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0007087400024766
INTRODUCTION
Leonardo's fascination with Archimedes as well as with his mathematics is well known.
There are three fairly extensive and eccentric comments in the surviving notebooks:
on his military inventions; on his part in an Anglo-Spanish conflict and on his activities,
death and burial at the siege of Syracuse. Reti has examined the first of the three, that
about the Architronito or steam cannon, mainly considering the origin of the idea for
the cannon and its attribution to Archimedes, but with comments on the later influence
of Leonardo's ideas. Marshall Clagett has produced the most comprehensive attempt
to try to identify Leonardo's sources for the third. ….
Reti's analysis can be supplemented and extended in the light of more recent comments
and Sakas' experimental demonstration of a miniature working model, and
Clagett's proposed sources modified. The origins of the other reference, Leonardo's
belief that Archimedes played a part in an Anglo-Spanish war, can also be rendered
slightly less baffling. Any conclusions must necessarily be tentative given the generally
accepted opinion that much less than half of Leonardo's manuscripts survive. ….
ARCHITRONITO
Leonardo's earliest surviving mention (late 1480s-1490) of Archimedes' weapons of
war is perhaps the most startling (Ms.B 33r): ….
Architronito. Gunsight. Ensure that the rod en is placed over the centre of the table fixed
beneath so that the water can fall with a single shot on to this table.
The Architronito is a machine of fine copper, an invention of Archimedes, and it throws
iron balls with great noise and violence. It is used in this manner:—the third part of the
instrument stands within a great quantity of burning coals and when it has been brought to white heat you turn the screw d, which is above the cistern of water abc, at the same time that you turn the screw below the cistern and all the water it contains will descend into the white hot part of the barrel. There it will instantly become transformed into so much steam that it will seem astonishing, and especially when one notes with what force and hears the roar that it will produce. This machine has driven a ball weighing one talent six stadia.
….
Origins of the attribution
Reti demonstrated that Leonardo's source of the idea for this weapon was the drawings
of cannons in De Re Militari by Valturius, who stated that the cannon had been
invented—ut putatur—by Archimedes. ….
[End of quote]
And here is another one, with an interesting question posed at the end of it (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/159447):
In 1499 Leonardo di Vinci is hired by Cesare Borgia as a military engineer. He begins to work on a steam canon that had originally been an idea of Archimedes 1500 years earlier. Leonardo tells Cesare the story of Archimedes and how he made many discoveries in mathematics and science.
Archimedes visits Alexandria and falls in love with Princess Helena, and in spite of their age difference, they marry and return to Syracuse. Soon Helena gives birth to their only child, a daughter they name Arsinoe.
For nearly fifty years of peace, Syracuse is drawn into the war between Rome and Carthage. Archimedes must use all his vast knowledge to defend Syracuse and his very family.
Cesare offers to purchase the chest of ideas from Leonardo but he declines the offer. Who knows which of Leonardo de Vinci’s inventions were really the brainchild of Archimedes of Syracuse?
Cesare offers to purchase the chest of ideas from Leonardo but he declines the offer. Who knows which of Leonardo de Vinci’s inventions were really the brainchild of Archimedes of Syracuse?
[End of quote]
Yes, indeed, who knows just how much of what is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci really belonged to Archimedes - a possibly fictitious character, anyway? Or was borrowed from an even earlier period of history, such as the neo-Assyrian era of c. 700 BC, when Archimedes’ supposed Screw Pump was already in effective use by the Assyrian king, Sennacherib?
What is the real Da Vinci Code?
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