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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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 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.
