Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Solve Century-Old Optics Mystery
evan_arrrr! writes "From the article:
Since the early 20th century physicists have known that light carries momentum, but the way this momentum changes as light passes through different media is much less clear. Two rival theories of the time predicted precisely the opposite effect for light incident on a dielectric: one suggesting it pushes the surface in the direction light is traveling; the other suggesting it drags the surface backwards towards the source of light. After 100 years of conflicting experimental results, a team of experimentalists from China believe they have finally found a resolution."
And the winner is... "pressure!"
Dang it!!! There goes my bet with Hawking about making a tractor beam. But wait... if we could use a photon emitted from NEGATIVE MASS it would have NEGATIVE MOMENTUM!!! Ok, Stephen... it's ON!
The mystery is whether or not giving your child the same name as a feminine pronoun is confusing.
The answer is, yes, it's very confusing.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
well doesn't everyone have to read the article first in order to comment on it?
Wait.. what the hell am I thinking?
That's what *SHE* said!
Don't underestimate the power of Slashdot. It's as if millions of mouse clicks suddenly jumped out into the internets and the servers where suddenly silenced.
Also, as a non-physicist, it can be fun to pit theorists and experimentalists against each other in battles to the death and watch what happens.
Wow, you just don't get it. There's no need to actually pit them against each other, I can provide mathematical proof that the experimentalists will win 84.3% of the time.
Touche. But will the experimentalists be satisfied with your result, or will they want to have the fight anyway, just to be sure?
Being a computer scientist means you tell people how computers should work, not that you know how they actually work.
Exactly. This is why a charged battery is heavier than a dead battery (a fact you'll be thankful for if you ever have to push-start a car!)
Also, have you ever noticed how dust tends to accumulate on a window sill? As sunlight pours down through the window over time, a very tiny fraction of the light is converted from energy to mass. It happens too slowly to observe, but eventually it will accumulate into dust particles.
Different surfaces will result in different rates of mass conversion. I painted my house with a specially formulated paint with a very low rate of mass conversion, provided by a friend who has military contacts. It sure wasn't cheap, but worth it for all the time I save on dusting!