Question: Can light exert a force to move an object?

Andres Olivares del Campo answered on 12 Nov 2016:

Yes!

This is known as radiation pressure. Essentially, anything that moves, exerts a force on a surface if it is stopped by this surface (due to the change of momentum). This is the same that happens when you get hit by a ball and you feel the impact, don’t you?

Now, the force of one light particle (which is called a “photon”) is very small, but sometimes you get billions of light particles together in one place so that this force can be quite large! This happens with the light coming from the Sun, at the early universe and in other situations!