Da Vinci lived from 1452 to 1519,
so it’s the 500th anniversary of his death.
There is a lot of DaVinci material.
It's amazing it was preserved so well.
This codex is the only one that’s not in
a European museum.
Leonardo Da Vinci wrote all of his observations
in these notebooks,
and his ability to diagram things
and just think things through was the best.
500 years later we have the actual notebooks.
Taking Leonardo’s notebooks and translating
them
so everybody can understand
the way that DaVinci thought a little better
than before
is very important.
The Codescope is a piece of software
that lets you fully appreciate what DaVinci
was doing.
There’s 36 different pages here.
He does mirror writing, writing backwards.
Because he was left-handed, like I am,
if you write the normal way
then you are always smudging the ink.
And so if you do it backwards,
then you completely avoid that problem.
So here you’re just seeing the page exactly
as it looked to DaVinci.
This is the mirror where we flip it around,
and now here it is in English.
So this really gives you, you know, a direct
understanding.
Here, what he’s explaining is a phenomena
called earthshine.
Because it’s actually a reflection of the
sunlight
from the earth back unto that darker side
of the moon.
And as you go around
you’ll find these little interactive elements
that help you understand it.
Leonardo da Vinci was a genius in so many
different ways.
His curiosity drove him to understand art
and science,
and that idea that if you just look carefully,
that you could really figure the world out.
