Abstract
THE earliest attempts to detect the pressure of light were made in the eighteenth century. The corpuscular hypothesis was then almost universally accepted, and to the believers in that hypothesis the idea that light should exert a pressure upon a body against which it fell was perfectly natural. Regarding the atoms and molecules of a luminous surface as a battery of minute guns firing off a continuous stream of still more minute shot—the corpuscles—they inevitably supposed that any body bombarded by the shot would be pressed back. Many experiments were made to detect this bombardment by directing a powerful beam of light on to a delicately suspended disc, sometimes in air at ordinary pressures, sometimes in a vacuum, but with quite inconsistent and inconclusive results. They were met with the disturbances which still beset experiments on light forces—disturbances partly due to convection in the surrounding gas, and partly due to the radiometer action which Sir William Crookes discovered and investigated a hundred years later.
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The Pressure of Light 1 . Nature 84, 139–142 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/084139c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/084139c0