{"id":130,"date":"2009-06-23T15:52:09","date_gmt":"2009-06-23T20:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/06\/23\/solar-sailing\/"},"modified":"2009-06-23T15:52:09","modified_gmt":"2009-06-23T20:52:09","slug":"solar-sailing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/06\/23\/solar-sailing\/","title":{"rendered":"Solar sailing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just got back from vacation, which included some long plane trips that gave me a chance to catch up on my magazine reading.\u00a0 So just a couple of months late, I read this article in the Atlantic<\/a> on the Planetary Society’s attempts to get funding to build a prototype solar sailing spacecraft.\u00a0 For those who don’t know, the idea is to propel the ship using big sails that reflect sunlight.\u00a0 Since photons carry momentum, all of those photons bouncing off of the sail will impart momentum, making the craft go.<\/p>\n

It’s a pretty good article, but there’s one bit of it that baffles me:<\/p>\n

Not everyone concedes even the basics. The late Thomas Gold, of Cornell's Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, had insisted that solar sailing would never work, for the same reasons you cannot have a perpetual-motion machine: Carnot's rule and the iron second law of thermodynamics. No machine can extract an unlimited supply of free energy from any source; a certain "degradation" has to occur. And the problem is even more fundamental than that, Gold argued: the beautiful Mylar blades of Cosmos 1<\/em>, or 2<\/em>, will be too splendid to function, period. With "a perfect mirror, the two temperatures"\u20ac\u201dof the sails and the sun\u20ac\u201d"will be the same," Gold reasoned. "And it follows that the mirror cannot act as a heat engine at all: no free energy can be obtained from the light."<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Any time you read a description of a technical argument in a nontechnical article, you have to reverse-engineer the details of the argument from the general description.\u00a0 I can’t do that here: I can’t imagine any way that the argument imputed to Gold could make sense.\u00a0 First, a “perfect mirror” is precisely the sort of thing that will not<\/em> reach thermal equilibrium with the Sun, since it never absorbs thermal energy from the sunlight.\u00a0 Second, even if you don’t have a perfect mirror, it’s not true that such a system will eventually reach the same temperature as the Sun.\u00a0 For instance, the Earth has been absorbing 6000-degree sunlight for 4 billion years and is still at a relatively comfortable 300 K.\u00a0 Something similar applies to the solar sail.\u00a0 The point is that the Earth-Sun system is not a closed system: both are constantly radiating energy into the much colder deep-space environment.\u00a0 The entire closed system (i.e., the Universe) is very <\/em>gradually tending toward thermal equilibrium, but the idea that one small part of it (the Sun and the solar sail) will themselves reach equilibrium independent of the rest of the universe is nonsense.<\/p>\n

If there’s a serious argument lurking in there, I’d love to know what it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just got back from vacation, which included some long plane trips that gave me a chance to catch up on my magazine reading.\u00a0 So just a couple of months late, I read this article in the Atlantic on the Planetary Society’s attempts to get funding to build a prototype solar sailing spacecraft.\u00a0 For those … Continue reading Solar sailing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}