Context:
Aristotle and his contemporaries believed that the celestial bodies, particularly the Sun, is made of quintessence (fifth element) to be able to float that high up in the atmosphere. It is not the Sun that is hot, rather its rays having friction with the atmosphere that makes it hot.
Leonardo da Vinci disproved this by focusing sunlight in a concave mirror, arguing that the sun rays have intrinsic heat. He also observed how very hot metal turns white, the colour of the Sun.
I actually nicked the whole idea from Vsauce’s short: https://youtube.com/shorts/gNVj-FIxoe4
Just watch that instead, and spot the comment where I got this meme from.
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He also observed how very hot metal turns white, the colour of the Sun.
I really hate the fact that this logic makes sense.
Edit: For the uninitiated, “it’s the same color as the sun therefore the sun is hot” is the kind of natural philosophy “proof” that we usually laugh about today, but in this case it’s actually accurate because in both cases it’s black body radiation at work.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the thinking at the time was that the sun couldn’t be hot as fire is more yellow in colour, so the sun can clearly not be burning as it’s white. And then Leonardo pointed out that really hot metal is also white.
Aristoteles was a dumb motherfucker with loads of shot ideas.
Who died and made Aristotle king of the nerds?
Platon
Platon would challenge you to a fist fight if you happened to disagree with him, though. Very compelling argument, but I’m not perfectly sure that this is fair.
Platon would suplex me to kingdom come, but philosophy is dirty
I know Aristotle sounds stupid but I don’t see how da Vinci disproved it.
Aristotle said the sun itself wasn’t hot but created heat through friction. So the heat came off the sun because of that friction. You can focus that heat no matter the source.
A more knowledgeable (but still inaccurate) Aristotle could have argued: The hydrogen (quintessence) that makes up the sun doesn’t have intrinsic heat but heat is created through gravitational compression and fusion.
Nice meme (funny) 👍
I don’t see how a concave mirror disproves Aristotles theory. Why wouldn’t concentrating the friction rays also result in more heat?
As for the second bit, the sun isn’t made out of metal. And metal isn’t the only thing that turns white. Dog shit used to turn white, but not because of heat.
Concentrating the beams increases heat without increasing friction, so the heat is intrinsic to the beams.
Just saw that last night! I had had no idea we ever thought like that.
