(Gregory L. Hansen) wrote

Dang, I don't know what to say. Gold is a putz,

Gold is, ah, interesting... Check out his theory on the origin of
petroleum.

and I thought New Scientist was better than that.

Life teaches us bitter lessons.

I didn't realize a solar sail was a heat engine.

It *is* a heat engine, properly analyzed. Others in this thread
have done that; Gold did not. In a sense, what a solar sail does
is thermodynamically not that much diffrent than what a piston in
your car's engine does. Although, thermodynamics aside, Newtonian
mechanics does just fine for understanding how a solar sail works.