ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Hockney–Falco thesis

The Hockney-Falco thesis is like solving a mystery. Do you like solving mysteries? Imagine you have a puzzle to solve, and it's made up of a lot of pieces. Each piece is like a clue, and it can help you figure out what the puzzle looks like when it's finished.

The Hockney-Falco thesis is about solving a puzzle that's very old. It's all about paintings, and it tries to solve a mystery about how some of the old masters made their paintings hundreds of years ago. Now, some of these old paintings looked so real, like a picture you might take with your phone today. But back then, there were no cameras or computers, so how did they make such realistic paintings?

David Hockney, an artist, and Charles Falco, a physicist, tried to solve this mystery. They looked at a lot of old paintings and they found some clues that could help them solve the mystery. One of the clues was about how some paintings had a very clear perspective, which means that things that are closer to us look bigger than things that are far away from us.

They also noticed that some of the old masters seemed to use something called a "camera obscura," which is like a little box that has a tiny hole in one side. If you looked through the hole, you could see things outside, but they would be upside down. Does that sound strange? It's like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. But the camera obscura could help artists draw things that looked realistic, just like they look in real life.

So, to sum up, Hockney and Falco solved the mystery of how some of the old masters made their realistic paintings by finding clues like perspective and the use of a camera obscura. It was like putting together a puzzle, but instead of using puzzle pieces, they used clues to help solve the mystery.