4 ms·
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 ligh
by skolos 8y ago
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 conclusions. Black and grey body discussion is in same realm, so we will avoid it here.
Let's consider piece of wood and try to see what it takes to combust it. We need two things - oxygen and high enough temperature. We are keeping this piece of wood in air, so we have oxygen. The temperature is how fast particles that compose piece of wood are moving. The wood consists of molecules, which are in turn consist of atoms. You can imagine a molecule is a bunch of atoms connected with each other by springs (the springs are created by electromagnetic forces when atoms lend and borrow electrons). The higher the temperature - the larger oscillations of these springs. When the temperature is high enough some of these springs can break and combine with oxygen to release energy - combustion.
Suppose light strikes some piece of wood. What happens? Photons hit molecules and they can interact with an electron or proton - they exchange momentum (and energy), which means that one of the atoms in a molecule gets a bump - springs would start oscillating harder.
Note, low energy photons cannot swing springs a lot. We need photons of high energy to swing spring to high temperature (ok - this part is too oversimplified, I can extend on this if there are questions). The energy of photons depends on their waivelength - the shorter waivelength - the more energetic photons. So we need photons with energy that could break molecular bonds (springs) to be able to heat up to combustion temperature. Visible light definitely has photons of such energy.
So we start sending light down our piece of wood, it starts heating up. But it sits in air and probably fixed by some supporting stand. This piece of wood starts exchanging heat with surrounding materials. To be able to overcome this we need to send lots of photons on this piece of wood. How do we do this? We use lens to collect the photons from broader area and send it down to the wood. Note that it doesn't matter where photons came from, were they scattered or produced by sun, what temperature of scattering surface was, not even what temperature of sun was. All what is matter - can we collect enough high energy photons. So we would need to calculate what is energy flux of visible light photons at the surface earth and see if we could come up with a lens to focus these photons on piece of wood to create sufficient intensity.
We know that we can see Moon in visible light, so it does sends bunch of energetic photons to us. All these photon are coming from moon direction (so we don't care that moon scatters them in other directions as well). So the task is to find what is the energy flux of these photons at earth surface and what size of lens we would need to get sufficient intensity.
- robbiep 8y agoI am not an expert but on your oversimplification on the ‘High energy = higher wavelength’ Whilst this is true, it is also a bit irrelevant. Gamma rays are higher energy than visible light but you don’t need to focus gamma radiation (should that be easily possible) to start a fire, you can do it with visible light; or infrared light (which is lower wavelength again) at a high enough qanta
- skolos 8y agoHigher energy = lower wavelength is not oversimplification. The formula is: photon energy is plank constan times speed of light divided by wavelength. You right - you don’t need gamma rays, but you cannot do it with low frequency radio waves. You need photons that energetic enough to break chemical bonds.
- mmmBacon 8y agoDepends on what you consider low frequency. Radio waves can be used to excite vibrational modes. The resultant thermal energy can be used to break chemical bonds.
- sopooneo 8y agoI don't have much to add, but I believe the poster you are replying to said that 'High energy = shorter wavelength'. Equivalently, higher energy photons are higher frequency.
- username90 8y agoYour 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.