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Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

what-if.xkcd.com

261–270 of 277 posts

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#261
I'm not buying this. The Moon is only a reflector, not a producer of light. The temperature of the light is that of the reflected source. Moonlight is sunlight, more or less. The fact that the moon reflects poorly is compensated by the size of the gathering lens or mirror.

Suppose we build a 100 foot mirror which reflects 10% of sunlight, such that the spectrum remains the same. We could still make a fire with the reflected light, if we just gather 10 times more of it with a larger lens. We could do this in the Arctic, with the mirror's temperature at below zero; the mirror's temperature is irrelevant.

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#262
post #197
post #145

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…

Looking through comments. There is still lots misunderstanding. So let's get deeper into the topic. In particular - how stuff gets heated by light and what light "temperature" is. Thermodynamics arguments are always good but you really need to understand that most of them describe closed systems under equilibrium. Real world is messier and if your understanding of thermodynamics is shaky its easy to get to wrong conc…

Your argument about low energy photons being capped at a black body level for heating is nonsense, a system can absorb all photons it can emit so typical matter can more or less absorb everything. Once energy from a photon has been absorbed it will diffuse in the material, increasing its temperature, energy quanta doesn't come into consideration here.

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#263

I'm not buying this. The Moon is only a reflector, not a producer of light. The temperature of the light is that of the reflected source. Moonlight is sunlight, more or less. The fact that the moon reflects poorly is compensated by the size of the gathering lens or mirror. Suppose we build a 100 foot mirror which reflects 10% of sunlight, such that the spectrum remains the same. We could still make a fire with the re…

What matters is that we have intensity with quadratic falloff. Light from the sun has quadratic falloff based on the distance from the sun and hence can't be bent to become more intense than at the suns surface. Similarly light from the moon has quadratic falloff based on the distance from the moon and hence can't be bent to become more intense than at the moons surface. If you put a mirror on the moon, then the light from it will have quadratic falloff from the reflected sun and not the moon, which is why it can be used to heat to sun level temperatures.

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#264
post #259
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the light coming from the moon is a combination of diffuse and specular reflection... and again (just like for the black body argument) the fraction of light which is specular is most important. The fact that the moon subtends 0.5deg out of 180, while reflecting more than 10% of light (12% bond albedo) suggests to me that what we see is not only lambertian (or cos2) diffuse reflection, but it depends on absorptio…

Whoa. I don't think most of the rest is specular reflection, since we never see any specular highlights on the moon, but if it is non-Lambertian, it might be possible to heat it up better than if the moon were actually a black-body or pefect Lambertian scatterer. Thanks for pointing this out; I seem to have learnt of a new phenomenon I wasn't previously aware of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_surge

Actually, I was reading a very old article that some astronomers (lunonomers?) had seen intermittant specular reflections of small patches on the moon, with some calculations estimating size. https://doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(68)90077-8

At this point I almost think an experimental measurement of temperature equilibrium would be publishable from one of the old re/frac/flectors you can put your head into.

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#265

I'm not buying this. The Moon is only a reflector, not a producer of light. The temperature of the light is that of the reflected source. Moonlight is sunlight, more or less. The fact that the moon reflects poorly is compensated by the size of the gathering lens or mirror. Suppose we build a 100 foot mirror which reflects 10% of sunlight, such that the spectrum remains the same. We could still make a fire with the re…

What matters is that we have intensity with quadratic falloff. Light from the sun has quadratic falloff based on the distance from the sun and hence can't be bent to become more intense than at the suns surface. Similarly light from the moon has quadratic falloff based on the distance from the moon and hence can't be bent to become more intense than at the moons surface. If you put a mirror on the moon, then the ligh…

Yes, since the moon is a scattering reflector, in fact the inverse square dropoff of moonlight is based on the distance from the moon.

Note that the article claims that no matter how much moonlight we are able to gather (i.e. we are allowed to overcome the inverse square law however much we want) we cannot create a temperature that will ignite paper.

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I suspect you can't start a fire from moonlight in practice, I don't think the arguments in this article are correct. I guess if you're reading that as some kind of absolutely logical argument. I read stuff like that as an abstraction which just kinda works in the messy real world. Pretty much like how the typical explanation for how a wing works turns out to be an over-simplification. It only partly works that…

It’s presented as an absolute logical argument of the form “you can’t use a lens to make anything hotter than the average surface of the moon.”

And it "kinda" works in the same way the simplified Bernoulli explanation of the wing works.

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#267
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While I suspect you can't start a fire from moonlight in practice Ivanpah may be able to, I wonder if we can borrow it at night for an experiment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

now this is an idea i like.

I wonder what the protocol is for 'borrowing' Ivanpah to point it at the moon at night and at what point in the exchange the phrase, 'well, you won't be using it', will finally occur.

edit - And by whom. Should probably get it in early, just in case.

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But you could instead cover the whole moon with some kind of dust that reflects 12% of incoming irradiation in average. You're arguing technical problems with a toy example illustrating an unrelated point.

Each of those specks of dust modeled as a tiny mirror would be very much subject to diffraction limits. This would basically make what you propose equivalent to an approximate black body that's like asphalt with 12% albedo.

Dandy.

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#269
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm bothered by the modifer "much". If you are indeed talking about a physical principle, shouldn't this be an absolute limit rather than a suggestion? It's an absolute limit on the amount of incoming irradiance you can create to your object. The actual equilibrium temperature it reaches will depend on additional factors like how well your object loses heat (eg. by conduction) compared to a moon rock. In this case,…

Thanks for the reply, and I think I agree with all the physical processes you describe, but I'm not convinced that your approximations are correct. I'm going to keep pushing a bit to see if we can resolve this as well. [The surface temperature of the moon is] an absolute limit on the amount of incoming irradiance you can create to your object. This is true for a black body, but why are you convinced this is true for…

> [The surface temperature of the moon is] an absolute limit on the amount of incoming irradiance you can create to your object.

It's the radiance (brightness) of the moon (as perceived at the moon) that is an absolute limit on the incoming irradiance you can create, because of conservation of etendue.

Separately, the fact that moon rocks (which experience that exact amount of irradiance) reach some given temperature X°C while losing very little heat to conduction (certainly less than an object on earth would), shows that this level of irradiance is insufficient to heat up your kindling above X°C.

This argument has nothing to do with the moon being a black body, or an approximate black body, or any such thing. Just the fact that moon rocks, which are exposed to this light (with very little heat conductive losses), function as a kind of a thermometer which tells you how hot that light can make something[1]; and the answer is "a bit over 100°C"

> Since the moon absorbs about 90% of the light incident on it, we can assume that the surface temperature is lower than it would be if it was a perfect black body, presumably reaching a temperature corresponding to a sun that was about 10% less strong.

No... An object with 90% absorbance absorbs 10% less light energy, yes. But it also emits 10% less light energy, so the two effects cancel out and it reaches the same equilibrium temperature as a black body.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_temperature

Re: Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)

#270
post #233
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The this I refer to is "the principle of etendue": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue and I agree it's counterintuitive and it's OK for people to come up with ideas, but when you hit the point of "hey, the thermo people have a nice collection of proofs demonstrating this, and it fits very well with the underlying theory, oh, and if you do manage to violate etendue, you could probably build a perpetual motion machi…

The this I refer to is "the principle of etendue" Great principle. I agree with it, and think that most of the people offering objections here do as well. Our question is whether it's it's being applied correctly in this case. For me, the sticking point is whether surface temperature can be used as a proxy for the brightness we care about. BTW, what's your obsession with Munroe? I have none. He's a great explainer, p…

I don't have any problem with people complaing about Monroe's argument. I am fairly certain he wrote what he did in consultation with optics engineers, and then modified it so it was intellectually comprehensible by a nerd-but-not-optical engineer audience.
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