I have a friend who refuses to stand in front of the microwave oven in his kitch…

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I have a friend who refuses to stand in front of the microwave oven in his kitchen, because he feels the “nuclear waves” leak and will cause his sperm to deform (and he doesn’t want ugly kids). Is this true? What about car phones? He heard they were bad, too!

Both microwave ovens and car phones emit electromagnetic radiation. But that radiation has relatively long wavelengths (about 12 cm in the case of microwave ovens and about 40 cm in the case of car phones) and is not at all like the electromagnetic waves emitted by nuclear processes. Nuclear electromagnetic radiation, usually called gamma rays, has extremely short wavelengths (less than 0.001 nanometer or about a millionth of the wavelength of visible light). All electromagnetic waves are emitted and absorbed as particles called photons. The energy in a photon is inversely proportional to its wavelength (in vacuum). Gamma rays, with their short wavelengths, have very energetic photons that can do lots of chemical damage to your tissue. But the longer wavelength radiation from microwave ovens and car phones comes as very low energy photons. These photons can’t do chemical damage. The only thing those waves can do is heat things. Microwave ovens are carefully shielded so that they keep most of the microwaves inside. If those waves did emerge, they would simply warm your tissue up. This warming won’t cause genetic damage but it could cook your tissue. There has been recent concern about low frequency electromagnetic fields causing subtle damage to tissue, but these have not be substantiated by scientific research and no physically reasonable scenarios for how such damage could occur have been offered.

How does the resonant cavity in the magnetron work?

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How does the resonant cavity in the magnetron work?

When it’s active, the magnetron’s cavity has electric charge sloshing back and forth along its tines. The charge moves at a frequency determined by the shape and size of the cavity and these are carefully controlled so that the cavity’s natural resonance frequency is 2.45 gigahertz. To keep the charge sloshing, the magnetron adds negative charge from a hot filament wire located in the center of the cavity. Electrons flowing off of this wire are steered toward the negative tines by a magnetic field. As a result, the charges continue to slosh back and forth indefinitely. A small wire connected inside the magnetron extracts some of the energy in the magnetron and converts it into microwaves outside the magnetron. This wire acts as an antenna. The antenna is located in the pipe that carries the microwaves to the cooking chamber.

How does a microwave oven defrost foods? Doesn’t it only work with water, not ic…

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How does a microwave oven defrost foods? Doesn’t it only work with water, not ice?

In any frozen food, there are some water molecules that are relatively free to turn about. These molecules may be at the surfaces of ice crystals or sitting on the surface of food particles. These water molecules can absorb microwaves and heat. However, the heating is very uneven because as soon as any water crystal absorbs enough heat to melt, the resulting liquid water will begin to absorb microwaves much more strongly. That is why defrosting must be done slowly. Then the microwave deposited heat will have time to flow through the food and melt it uniformly. Otherwise, you can end up with boiling hot spots mixed together with frozen icy spots.

How do metal rods short out the microwaves?

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How do metal rods short out the microwaves?

If you arrange a metal rod so that it’s parallel to a microwave’s electric field, the microwave will push electric charges up and down that rod. This moving charge will waste some of the microwave’s energy by creating heat in the rod. But the main effect will be that the rod will reflect or scatter the microwave. The moving charge will emit its own microwave and this new microwave will interfere with the original one.

How can microwaves heat something? Radio waves don’t warm things very much.

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How can microwaves heat something? Radio waves don’t warm things very much.

The electric field of a microwave flips back and forth at just about the right frequency to have the largest effect on water molecules. The water molecules try to follow the reversing electric field and, in doing so, become hotter and hotter. Radio waves flip too slowly to have very much effect on water. Furthermore, the microwaves in an oven are far more intense than the radio waves that we’re used to have around us so that common radio waves just don’t do very much cooking.

Can microwaves be emitted to travel in one direction?

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Can microwaves be emitted to travel in one direction?

Yes. Like all electromagnetic waves, microwaves can be focused and concentrated in a particular direction. That is exactly what microwave dish antennas (e.g., satellite dishes) do. At the transmitter, they focus the microwaves emitted by a smaller antenna so that those microwaves travel as a parallel beam. At the receiver, they focus the parallel beam of microwaves onto a smaller antenna. You can think of the microwaves as very long wavelength light waves, so that anything you can do with light (e.g., focus it, form images with it, or bend it with optical devices), you can also do with microwaves. The only problem is that the optical elements you use for microwaves must be larger, because the microwaves have longer wavelengths.

Are microwaves harmful to you? Is eating microwaved food harmful?

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Are microwaves harmful to you? Is eating microwaved food harmful?

Microwaves can heat your body by adding thermal energy to the water molecules in you. This heating can be damaging if it’s not controlled. Most of your body is protected from slow heating because your blood carries heat away from any local hot spots so that you warm evenly. However there are a few places that aren’t cooled by your circulation and can heat up locally enough to denature the protein molecules and cause biological injury. The cornea of your eye is a good example. It can be heated and damaged because it’s not cooled well. That’s why you must be careful not to look into a strong beam of microwaves. As for microwaved food, the only effect of cooking with microwaves is hot food. There is no “radiation damage” or “radioactivity,” as there might be with x-ray or gamma radiation. Some foods should not be cooked in a microwave only because the uneven heating may allow certain parts to become too hot. Those parts may burn you when you eat them or they may suffer thermal damage that diminishes their nutritional value.

Are microwaves distributed unevenly in the oven? Why do manufacturers claim that…

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Are microwaves distributed unevenly in the oven? Why do manufacturers claim that microwaves with turntables are more effective than microwaves without turntables?

As the microwaves bounce around the inside of the cooking chamber, they tend to interfere with one another. There are usually regions in which the waves that follow various paths almost cancel one another and regions in which the waves reinforce one another. These regions don’t cook food equally well. If the microwaves are canceled in one region, cooking will be slow there. If the microwaves reinforce one another in another region, cooking will be fast there. If you simply leave food in one place and try to cook it in the microwaves, the cooking will be uneven. However, if the food is rotated continuously, these good and bad cooking regions will be blurred away so that the food will all cook at about the same speed.

What is one doing when changing the brightness, contrast, and color adjustments …

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What is one doing when changing the brightness, contrast, and color adjustments on a television?

The brightness control determines the maximum strength of the electron beam and thus the peak brightness of the phosphors on the screen. The contrast control determines the extent to which the electron beam current changes between bright regions and dim regions on the screen. If the contrast is high, then even a less-than-white spot in the image may produce full beam current and full brightness in the phosphors and a more-than-black spot in the image may be cast as full black (no beam at all). If the contrast is low, then almost the entire screen will be illuminated by a medium electron beam and the image have no full black or full white. The color adjustments control the relative intensities of the red, green, and blue guns. Because of the way color is encoded in the television signal, the traditional controls are hue and tint, which involve mixtures of red, green, and blue. All these controls involve adjustments to the voltages and currents in the electron guns (cathodes), grids, and anodes of the picture tube.

If you stand between the two satellites, would you have light on you?

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If you stand between the two satellites, would you have light on you?

When two satellites beam their radio waves at you, you are exposed to both of those waves. A normal antenna would not be able to distinguish between them and it would be hard to receive the transmissions of one and not the other. But with a satellite dish, you can easily select the transmissions of one and exclude those of the other. The satellite dish is directional, meaning that it focuses and collects radio waves from a particular direction while ignoring those from other directions. With a satellite dish aimed at a particular satellite, you can receive only transmissions from that satellite.