Could I use a torch to push me in space?

Chris - Yeah and the answer is, it does work. In fact, there's something called the YORP effect, Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack effect in honour of the four scientists who described this first of all. If you look at asteroids and they are spinning in space and they're irregularly shaped, when they have one surface facing at the sun, which is a different size, say to the other face, then that face gets a disproportionately big push compared with when the object then turns on its side for example. And what this does is to create a push or a torque effect, which tends to steer the asteroid and change its path through space. And this is one effect which is thought to have unleashed this barrage of asteroids on earth that destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago because out in vestiges of the early solar system near mars are whole remnants of bits of planet that failed to form. And there are these fairly big objects out there and they are subject to the YORP effect. So light can definitely push things along, and that could go for a person too. We know we can push spacecrafts via the same thing. This is the whole concept of solar sailing. You have a very big collector. And when photons are incident on it, then they can give it a bit of a nudge and we can work out how much of a nudge a photon, when it arrives, gives something. We know from the Planck constant, if you times that by the frequency of the light, you can work out how much energy is imparted by a photon, a particle of light hitting something, and I have to say very big thank you to Light Arrow on our forum who suggested a very neat solution to this problem. So basically, yes. Light can give things a push. If our astronaut who's drifting around in space were armed with a laser beam and he were armed with a 3 kilowatt laser beam, then the energy, the nudge that he would get would be given by the equation F=w/c, where F is the force and it's equal to W, the wattage of the beam divided by the speed of light. And if we put the numbers in, 3 kilowatts is 3 x103 that's power of a laser. You divide that by the speed of light, 3 x 108. That would tell you that the force that the astronaut would feel through firing the laser would be about 10-5 newtons. On Earth, that would be the equivalent of holding up 1 milligram. In other words, about 1,000th of a gram. So, very small push but nonetheless, over enough time, given enough time, it would push the astronaut through space. You would have to point the laser in the direction opposite to which he wanted to travel. Dave - This is actually the ultimate rocket. You get the maximum push for every kilogram of stuff you throw out the back. So, if you want to travel a very, very long way, this is the way to do it.