Leonardo as a ‘mask’ and symbol on Julian Schwinger and Jagdish Mehra

Abstract

This paper's aim is to bring attention to a couple of hardly appreciated episodes in the reception of Leonardo among recent physicists. One - perhaps the most unexpected and intriguing - concerns Julian Schwinger (1918-1994), a crucial but somewhat elusive figure in 20th-century physics. First, we will provide a proper contextualization (as well as the surviving text) of a lecture that he dedicated to Leonardo in 1973, in Los Angeles, where he had recently moved (possible links to Carlo Pedretti will be briefly discussed). More in general, it is interesting to relate this episode to Schwinger's uses of the past in a peculiar phase of his career. The other case, possibly not entirely disconnected, is centered around the physicist and historian Jagdish Mehra (1931-2008), who celebrated Leonardo in a way that deserves some attention. Well beyond sensationalistic claims about "anticipations" of results and discoveries, these two episodes also provide an opportunity to methodologically frame and raise questions about the reception of Leonardo in a thematic (20th-century physics) and geographic area (the United States) in which further research could reveal some surprise.