User talk:Donnie higginbotham

Leonardo da Vinci
Hi Donnie!

Thanks for your contributions to Leonardo. I don't think anything has been written yet about Leonardo and chemistry.

You will find there is a page called Leonardo da Vinci - scientist and inventor. That is the right page to put this information, because the other page is very long. It only has room for a very brief description of his scientific studies.

Now, when you go to add to the "SCientist and inventor" page, you will see that it is all very carefull organised. If you are going to add a section, it must go in the right place. Everything you write has to be backed up with a reference.

For the time being, I am going to find the info that you wrote (which got deleted) and put it onto the discussion page at Leonardo da Vinci - scientist and inventor where you can work on it, we can fix some spelling and you can sort out where the info came from. OK! ....

--Amandajm 13:04, 3 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi Donnie!
 * I just did some research into Leonardo, to find out whether he was really an alchemist.
 * The answer is:- No he wasn't! He didn't believe in the Philosopher's stone. He was too smart for that! In fact, he said that alchemists really didn't understand about metals, and that they were wrong by thinking that mercury was the base for other metals.
 * Having cut up at least 30 bodies, he had a pretty good idea that they could not get eternal life through a magic potion. But he must have also known that medicines could help and that surgery could help, if the person was brave enough to have surgery.

--Amandajm 03:47, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Here's another interesting thing:- Noone realy knows whether Leonardo was religious or not. He certainly did very beautiful religious paintings.
 * But when he talks about the landscape, the rocks and the plants, he always say "Nature does this and this..." He doesn't say "God does this and this...".
 * This doesn't mean that he didn't believe in God. It means that he took an approach that was scientific. What he is saying is "In the world of nature, I observe that this is what happens..." (He isn't talking about Nature as if she was an Earth Godess or anything like that.)


 * There are a lot of people who would like to believe that Leonardo was involved with things that were dark, mysterious and magical, or (like Dan Brown) that he was involved in a secret society. But there is no reason to believe that a man who spent his whole life studying things to find out real facts was mixed up in magic or mystery of any sort.


 * He wrote thousands of words about all sorts of things. Some people say that he wrote backwards so that other s couldn't read them. But this is nonsense.
 * If you are left handed, it is very hard to write forwards with a quill or an old-fashioned split nib. The nib gets pushed into the paper in a horrid way. One of the things that Leonardo did to make his journals easy to follow is he never wrote a topic on more than one page. Whatever scientific thing he was writing about, he wrote it on both sides of a single page so that if pages got muuddled, evry part was always complete in itself. In other words, he wanted people to use all this interesting info.


 * One thing about Leonardo that was kept secret was his love-life. This is probably because he was homosexual. He was arrested for homosexuality (which was illegal) for a short time when he was about twenty, but nothing was proved against him. Being in jail would have been a terrifying experience for a young man like him who was very beautiful to look at, because he would have been raped for sure. It is easy to understand why he never said anything more about it. Because of this, people have been free to imagine (and write)whatever they like.


 * The other thing that we don't know much about is what he thought about God. If Leonardo did not believe in God, then it would be very dangerous to say so. He could be burned at the stake if he wrote things that led other people away from the Church. So Leonardo worked and wrote with things that could be seen. God could not.
 * On the other hand, we know that Michelangelo was a very religious man, who had a very good knowledge of the Bible.


 * If you go to the page Leonardo da Vinci - scientist and inventor you will see that I have put in two quotes about alchemy.

--Amandajm 04:33, 4 May 2007 (UTC)