THE UNIVERSAL MIND

Nobody read him. Not one of his discoveries entered science through him. Every single one had to be found again, from scratch, by people who had never heard his name.
This is a book about what that costs - and about the method that produced the discoveries in the first place. Leonardo da Vinci looked at a river and saw an artery. He looked at a tree and found a law of branching that botanists still cite. He looked at a bird and built a wing. The same habit of mind that gave him his finest results also convinced him that blood rises through the body the way sap rises through a plant, which is wrong, and wrong in a way that stopped him cold for years. Analogy is the engine of this book: what it can do, what it costs, and how to tell the difference.
Along the way: a job application that was mostly lies, a bronze horse melted into cannon, a mural that began peeling off the wall while the painter was still alive, twenty-five years of litigation with a religious brotherhood, a plaque in the Tuscan hills commemorating a flight that never happened, and the most famous painting on earth, which became famous because somebody stole it.
Written with warmth, considerable mischief, and no mathematics whatsoever, this is not a life of a genius. It is a book about how knowledge becomes knowledge - and about a man who found more of it than anyone in his century and handed almost none of it on.
Keywords: Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance, history of science, analogy, anatomy, invention, scientific method