151–160 of 277 posts
I think one thing which would help me develop an intuition for it would be to see the calculation of the lens size for heating a one square-centimeter area on the earth to as high a temperature as possible by the light of the moon, and what that optimal temperature is.
Anyone reading for whom this is straightforward? Even a description of how to do the calculation would go a long way.
Interesting article. Right in many places. Wrong (possibly) in main conclusion. Entropy argument - correct in the sense that using radiation from black body we cannot use lenses to heat another body to the temperature higher than original. Easy to understand why - the first body has a temperature, radiation has the same temperature, if we apply the radiation to another object it will not heat up more than the radiati…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the maximum temperature that system can achieve is much less that your mirror/magnifying glass system. Why? If the moon were a perfect black body, but with a few small perfect mirrors on the surface to bounce a bit of sunlight towards Earth, couldn't we (in theory) focus that tiny bit of sunlight to heat something up to the temperature of the Sun? There may not be enough solar radiation to make it feasible in pr…
Why? If the moon were a perfect black body, but with a few small perfect mirrors on the surface to bounce a bit of sunlight towards Earth, couldn't we (in theory) focus that tiny bit of sunlight to heat something up to the temperature of the Sun? To get past the diffraction limits, those "few small perfect mirrors" on the Moon would have to be gargantuan. (If I'm remembering correctly, they'd be the size of the alien…
Interesting article. Right in many places. Wrong (possibly) in main conclusion. Entropy argument - correct in the sense that using radiation from black body we cannot use lenses to heat another body to the temperature higher than original. Easy to understand why - the first body has a temperature, radiation has the same temperature, if we apply the radiation to another object it will not heat up more than the radiati…
As I thought more of why one might get confused with this question is because one might miss that there are two effects here, not one. To have a combustion we need two things - light of high enough temperature and light of high enough energy concentration. The two are not the same. All visible light has high enough temperature. However the concentration is the problem Why do we need high concentration for combustion?…
An interesting demonstration of this idea is putting a paper cup full of water into a fire. It won't burn where the water is touching it and eventually the water will start to boil.
Interesting article. Right in many places. Wrong (possibly) in main conclusion. Entropy argument - correct in the sense that using radiation from black body we cannot use lenses to heat another body to the temperature higher than original. Easy to understand why - the first body has a temperature, radiation has the same temperature, if we apply the radiation to another object it will not heat up more than the radiati…
Yeah, this was my immediate thought as well. Yes, you can't concentrate solar energy to heat something hotter than the surface of the sun. But the emission of a 100C blackbody is not visible either, so it's clearly an incorrect hypothesis on it's face that this temperature causes moonlight. It's a bad mirror, not a radiator.
It struck me as very similar to the setup in this video. https://youtu.be/awADEuv5vWY
At about 4 minutes in, a nearly identical setup is shown with a beam of light emerging from a block of opaque material using holographic techniques.
It seems plausible to me that a specially designed anti-moon hologram could allow reconstruction of the incident light from the sun, thus allowing a fire to be started without violating any law of thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics argument seems iffy to me. I can cover the entire surface of the earth with solar panels to harvest the moon light and use the combined electricity to melt iron. If this is ok with thermodynamics then so is using lenses. The rest of the argument seems to be that light cannot be optically condensed to a single point as there will always be some dispersion due to diffraction, and the size and shape of th…
(1) can't heat an object to a higher temperature than a source object using lenses - you can't transfer heat from a cooler object to a warmer object without work and lenses don't provide a mechanism for work. This still leaves room for reflected sunlight from moon albedo getting something hot enough to burn, at least from a thermodynamic perspective.
(2) you can get something arbitrarily hot using lunar panels, this is just a bad heat pump (max COP 1) where you feed work generated by the solar panels into a perfectly thermally isolated system with a resistive heater, and we could do this a bit more efficiently with a true heat pump.
Interesting article. Right in many places. Wrong (possibly) in main conclusion. Entropy argument - correct in the sense that using radiation from black body we cannot use lenses to heat another body to the temperature higher than original. Easy to understand why - the first body has a temperature, radiation has the same temperature, if we apply the radiation to another object it will not heat up more than the radiati…
To the extent that the moon acts as a greybody under sunlight, it is correct. And like most things, the moon will be close enough to a greybody that you could use the surface temperature as a first order approximation. It isn't necessary of course, since you can easily just directly estimate the amount of scattered / re-radiated energy from the amount of sunlight falling on it, without needing to use the temperature.
>Hence the question is now - can we concentrate moon light enough so that intensity at the concentration point is higher than thermal loss into environment (only then we will be able to raise temperature in the concentration area enough for combustion - remember that light is "hot" enough for this)?
No, because the body you're trying to heat up will act as an approximate greybody, so (neglecting conduction and convection which could further lower the temperature) its temperature has to max out at the Stefan-Boltzmann temperature represented by the total radiation.
> You can't use lenses and mirrors to make something hotter than the surface of the light source itself. This is an interesting argument. Can I not reflect some sunlight off a mirror, then do the magnifying-glass-to-start-a-fire trick in daytime? Doesn't the mirror stay cool? Isn't the moon just a (poor) mirror for the sun's light?
> You can't use lenses and mirrors to make something hotter than the surface of the light source itself. This is an interesting argument. Can I not reflect some sunlight off a mirror, then do the magnifying-glass-to-start-a-fire trick in daytime? Doesn't the mirror stay cool? Isn't the moon just a (poor) mirror for the sun's light?
If the light is being radiated from a black body surface, then you cannot make something hotter than that surface. But you're right, the light from the moon is reflected sun light, plenty hot to start a fire. The moon also radiates like a black body, but virtually all that light has longer wavelengths than the reflected visible light. You could start a fire from the light of a single star if you had a big enough lens…
It's mostly not reflected. It's mostly scattered. If it were specularly reflected, there would be a bright spot on the moon (where you could see the reflection of the sun), and you'd be able to concertate light from that to light a fire.