Engineers put Leonardo da Vinci's bridge design to the test (2019)

Clockpunk.

No. The roman bridges, the ones still up, lasted so long because they were ridiculously overbuilt. The romans lacked a full understanding and so made everything far stronger than we now know is necessary. Even with a millennia of weathering and erosion they still have more than enough strength to remain standing. Da Vinci's bridge design is more efficient and uses less material. It spreads a similar load on a lesser amount of material. If using the same materials as the romans (stone) it would not last the centuries because it would have less reserve strength to lose to weathering.

Even if it would have lasted, which I doubt, I also doubt it would have successfully inspired much, and certainly not any time before real engineering came about as a consequence of understanding physics and thus having a theory guiding and supporting work, rather than a cookbook of rules. (Like, the surviving ancient marvels notwithstanding, you can really only go so far in structures without an understanding of beam theory, stresses, even the square-cube law which wasn't articulated until Galileo.) When the architects and builders of the past (I think it's a stretch to call them engineers) veered too far from established practice, things tended to frequently collapse. A Roman example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building)

This is a problem I had at my last job, actually. We'd spend a lot of time on simulation that was kind of accurate but still need to do a fair bit of rapid prototyping to make up for simulation deficiencies afterwards.

For simple stuff like a prototype jig to hold equipment mockups can be faster to make out of rough cut materials instead of spending 2 weeks making everything fit in a CAD program.

I would think that could commonly be done without any university.

Making the actual physical model could be considered a better use of MIT resources while they are there.

I still remember some of the shake table stuff I did 30 years back.

In a later comment you say:

> "I expect the replica to be full of dangerous approximations: scaled weight of the stones not realistic, friction of the material not taken into consideration, earthquake ground vibrations not properly emulated by just shaking plates, etc"

How do you know that your model accurately represents the earthquake ground vibrations? How do you know that your model accurately represents the friction? Compressibility and friability of the materials? The scaled weight of the stones?

How many times have you written a large and complex program, only to find that there are real world cases you haven't considered?

I'm sure they did the computer modelling, but personally, I'm happy to see people building real-world versions to verify their (software and mathematical) models.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stari_Most

the initial team of "modern" structural engineers were convinced - after mathematical analysis and computers simulations - that the bridge could not possibly be re-built exactly as it was.

Then we contacted to verify the calculations an "old" structural engineer that believed that if something has been built and resisted (before the bombing) some 400 years, it can be built and is resistant enough.

It came out that due to some limitations of the software used at the time, and to some approximations in the design of the computer model, the resistance (and influence) of the lead fixed steel pins (that were - for the time of building - a technical marvel) was greatly underestimated, as well as the effect of the steel strips.

See here for some details on how the bridge was built:

https://www.litosonline.com/en/article/old-bridge-mostar-rec...