Would it be possible to put a thermometer inside a microwave oven? Would the microwaves have an effect on an electronic thermometer? Would they have an effect on a mercury thermometer? — R
This is an interesting question because it brings up the tricky issue of what is the temperature in a microwave oven. In fact, there is no specific temperature in the oven because the microwaves that do the cooking are not thermal. Rather than emerging from a hot object with a well-defined temperature, these microwaves are produced in a coherent fashion by a vacuum tube. Like the light emerging from a laser, these microwaves can heat objects they encounter as hot as you like, or at least until heat begins to escape from those objects as fast as it’s being added.
So instead of measuring the “temperature of the microwave oven,” people normally put thermometers in the food to measure the food’s temperature. This works well as long as the thermometers don’t interact with the microwaves in ways that make them either hotter or inaccurate. Electronic thermometers are common in high-end microwaves. There is nothing special about these electronic thermometers except that they are carefully shielded so that the microwaves don’t heat them or affect their readings. By “shielded,” I mean that each of these thermometers has a continuous metallic sheath that reflects the microwaves. This sheath extends from the wall of the oven’s cooking chamber all the way to the thermometer probe’s tip so that the microwaves themselves can’t enter the measurement electronics. Since the sheath reflects microwaves, the thermometer isn’t heated by the microwaves and only measures the temperature of the food it contacts.
On the other hand, putting a mercury thermometer in a microwave oven isn’t a good idea. While mercury is a metal and will reflect most of the microwaves that strike it, the microwaves will push a great many electric charges up and down the narrow column of mercury. This current flow will cause heating of the mercury because the column is too thin to tolerate the substantial current without becoming warm. The mercury can easily overheat, turn to gas, and explode the thermometer. (A reader of this web site reported having blown up a mercury thermometer just this way as a child.) Moreover, as charges slosh up and down the mercury column, they will periodically accumulate at the upper end. Since there is only a thin vapor of mercury gas above this upper surface, the accumulated charges will probably ionize this vapor and create a luminous mercury discharge. The thermometer would then turn into a mercury lamp, emitting ultraviolet light. I used microwave-powered mercury lamps similar to this in my thesis research fifteen years ago and they work very nicely.