Lesson 19: Aristotle discovered something very strange about how our eyes work. He discovered that as light enters our pupils, because it is such a small hole, the light beams that bounce off what we see enters our eye in such a way that the image appears upside down. This doesn’t seem to be true, but it is. The image that hits our retina (back of the eye) is upside down! Our brain has to learn how to flip the image right side up again when we are babies! You can try this experiment at home by creating a camera obscura at home. There are also very cool YouTube videos that show how this works.
Lesson 20: Aristotle spent a lot of time studying living things up close. He wanted to learn as much as he could. As he did so, he wanted to put them into groups that helped make sense of things. One way he decided to do this was to put animals into what he thought were animals with blood and animals without blood. We now know that all animals have blood, but not all of them have blood that is red and thick like ours. The blood of insects and other arthropods for example, is clear or yellowish. However, even though Aristotle was wrong about this bloody fact, he was right in a way. The two basic groups of animals are vertebrates (with backbones) and invertebrates (without backbones) and these two groups just happened to be the same groups that he sorted at with blood and without blood. Scientists today use dissection just like Aristotle did to discover the inner workings of animals. This has led to many advancements in medicine.
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