Drying the homework

I had an accident and my water bottle leaked onto the homework. I have dried it out and it has now been marked. But consider this method of drying on a radiator. I was taught that radiators are badly named and that they work principally by convection. This is true. If you hold your hand above a radiator you can feel the warm air rising. So why would you hang things next to a radiator? Try holding your hand a couple of centimetres from the side surface. You can feel warmth. That will be infra-red thermal radiation. White is said to be a bad emitter of radiation (remember that white reflects all the colours) but the point is that it is a bad emitter of visible wavelengths. It does emit quite well at infra-red wavelengths, so the homework dried. See the previous post about Leslie's Cube for more information http://wigtonphysics.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/leslies-cube-and-why-my-physics-teacher.html