The Science of Leonardo

Ah, another book to read. This looks like a keeper as Fritjof Capra knows his stuff as a respected researcher who takes a holistic view of reality and applies it to creativity and science with insight and style. Reading the review, one gets the idea society would have been radically different had da Vinci been able to publish his notebooks showing how he viewed his world and the roles science and medicine played in it.

“The Science of Leonardo is a fascinating glimpse of the road not taken by Western Science. Capra makes a compelling case that the science of the future may look a lot more like Leonardo's than Bacon's or Descartes -- a science of systems, non-reductive and akin to an art.
--Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma."

And: "The Science of Leonardo argues convincingly that this keen observer of nature was also a gentle soul in an age of shocking cruelty. He was, for example, a vegetarian, and he harbored no doubts that animals had souls; his drawings show cats, birds and horses with the same piercing, intelligent eyes and the same fierce dynamism as human beings. Unlike his contemporary Machiavelli, who wrote of conquering rivers, Leonardo declared that rivers could only be coaxed—and his terrifying drawings of rivers in flood, possibly inspired by a real cataclysm that struck Rome in 1514, show how profoundly he respected the power of nature."

"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions."
Leonardo da Vinci