Discovery
The fact that electromagnetic radiation exerts a pressure upon any surface exposed to it was deduced theoretically by James Clerk Maxwell in 1871 and Adolfo Bartoli in 1876, and proven experimentally by Russian physicist Peter Lebedev in 1900 and by Ernest Fox Nichols and Gordon Ferrie Hull in 1901. The pressure is very feeble, but can be detected by allowing the radiation to fall upon a delicately poised vane of reflective metal in a Nichols radiometer (this should not be confused with the Crookes radiometer, whose characteristic motion is not caused by radiation pressure but by impacting gas molecules).
Read more about this topic: Radiation Pressure
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“The new supplants the old. Yet men’s minds are stuffed with outworn bunk. Educating the young in the latest findings of authorities and scholars in the social sciences is important. It is equally important to devise ways and means for aiding the middle-aged and old to reexamine hang-over unscientific doctrines and ideas in the light of recent discovery and research.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn’t love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country ...”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“However backwards the world has been in former ages in the discovery of such points as GOD never meant us to know,—we have been more successful in our own days:Mthousands can trace out now the impressions of this divine intercourse in themselves, from the first moment they received it, and with such distinct intelligence of its progress and workings, as to require no evidence of its truth.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)