On Aug 31, 12:36 pm, Richard Clark wrote:
On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:20:50 -0700, John Smith

wrote:
What do you think turns those vanes--if it
ain't the "mass" of photons striking the plates?

Hmm, dare anyone ask either of you for a simple computation to support
this notion of "mass?"

If Arthur is so wedded to a Newtonian universe, it should be a walk in
the apple orchard.

A very simple question of rotational kinematics:
How much power is required to accelerate
the 1 gram mass of the vanes
from 0cM/s to 1cM/s in 10s?

Extra credit:
How many photons does it take to do this?

Extra special, super duper credit:
What is the weight of one of those photons?

You can use your calculator to convert mass to slugs in an Earth
environment. Of course, this may be an egregious speculation of
ability if the prior compuations are begged (or whined) off with
extraneous demands (not worth Newton's spit) for parsing F=MA.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

I'm left with the impression that JS, at least, hasn't a clue about
how those little radiometers actually work. (Or perhaps he just
thinks he's having fun with a little trolling.) Answers to your
questions, of course, won't get him there. Here are a couple of
questions that just might: Just how good is the vacuum in one of
those radiometers? What happens if you evacuate the globe down to,
say, 1e-6 Torr?

Cheers,
Tom