Leonardo da Vinci

Most of Leonardo books are in the art domain. What Isaacson does is to say what made da Vinci special. It casts his life in the broad sense by doing it chronologically. He explains why things flourished, how da Vinci was really so unique. Leonardo would write about different topics, how rivers flowed, or the symmetry of wings. You know, flight really fascinated him. He always wanted to build some artificial flying machine. He understood things that other people didn't figure out for hundreds of years. So he wrote all of his observations in these notebooks. And all these notebooks, thank God they weren't thrown away. Some were lost, but a lot are preserved to this day, including a small one that I own called the Lester Codex notebook. The rest are in European museums. This idea of visualizing things, being able to draw it out, and then talk about the phenomena, that's in all of these notebooks. And so they're unbelievable contributions to science. Da Vinci, his whole life, was most satisfied by scribbling and trying things out. If you study things, a lot of things make sense. Whenever da Vinci would get stuck, he had almost no peers. In science, he was largely on his own. Whereas now, you know, cool explanations of things are easily at hand. So it's a great time to go forward with curiosity. Walter talks about, hey, his human mind is not of a different character than yours. Therefore, you know, have fun with your curiosity. It's amazing how once you figure out one thing, that helps you understand the next thing. And then, you know, the whole thing makes sense. I love it when it works that way.