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strobe party
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Strictly speaking, you are correct. The key assumption for my statement above is that both objects are black-body radiators.
In practical terms, it still ain't happening when the light source is a bunch of fireflies.
Aside: Lasers are a really weird case. The population inversion required for stimulated emission is basically the opposite of a classic thermal equilibrium. By some definitions, they are so hot their "temperature" wraps around to negative (i.e., less than zero Kelvin). That factoid took me a while to wrap my head around.