Tag: microwave ovens

I’ve heard from many people that you should not stand directly in front of and no closer than 30 feet while a microwave oven is on? Why? If this is a myth how did it get started?

This idea is just a myth. There should be virtually no microwaves leaking from the oven so it shouldn’t matter where you stand. If you’re concerned about microwaves, you can buy a microwave oven tester from a local appliance store or from www.comforthouse.com (or for a more accurate and reliable measurement, take your microwave to a service shop for inspection with an FDA certified meter). I have no idea how such a myth got started, but it’s clear that microwave ovens scare people because they don’t understand them. Given how easy it is to burn yourself on a conventional oven, I’d guess that there are fewer health risks with microwave cooking than with conventional cooking.

Why does a microwave oven heat organic material and not inorganic material? — JM, Columbus, OH

A microwave oven heats anything that contains liquid water. Since many organic materials contain water, they will become hot in a microwave oven. But some organic materials such as pure salad oil don’t contain water and won’t become hot in a microwave oven. There are also some inorganic materials such as damp unglazed pottery that contain water and that will become hot.

Is 2.45 gigahertz the best frequency for a microwave oven? Is that frequency at or near a water molecule resonant frequency? Do water molecules have a resonant frequency?

The frequency of the microwaves used in most microwave ovens, 2.45 gigahertz or 2,450,000,000 cycles per second, isn’t related to any resonance of the water molecules themselves. While the isolated water molecules in steam or moist air have clear resonances associated with various vibrational and rotational modes of oscillation, these resonances are smeared out in liquid water. The water molecules in liquid water touch one another and their resonances are disturbed in much the same way that the resonances of a bell are disturbed when you touch it.

Rather than interacting with the water molecules via a resonance, the microwaves in an oven heat the water by twisting its molecules rapidly back and forth so that they rub against one another. The molecules are heated by the molecular equivalent of sliding or dynamic friction. The choice of 2.45 gigahertz gives the water molecules about the right amount of time to twist in each direction. The precise frequency isn’t important, but microwave ovens are required to operate at exactly 2.45 gigahertz so that they don’t interfere with communication systems using nearby frequencies. I believe that there are 2 other frequencies allocated to microwave ovens, but only a few ovens make use of those frequencies.

If you microwaved bean plant seeds over a period of weeks while they were growing, would they grow faster or longer, and if they would, would that be due to the heat or some effect of the microwave radiation? – DS

Microwaving the bean plant seeds would be no different from heating them, except that the distribution of temperatures in the seeds and soil might be a little different from what you would get if you simply used a space heater. The particles or photons of ultraviolet light, X-rays, or gamma rays have enough energy to cause chemical changes in organic molecules and can induce mutations in living organisms. However, the photons of microwaves have so little energy that all they can do is heat living things. The most likely result of microwaving the bean plant seeds will be that the seeds will overheat and won’t grow at all. You’ll have bean stew.

My mother owns a microwave oven that is about 20 years old. It looks like new and has always been well taken care of. However, I was wondering whether it is still safe to use. Should I have it tested for leakage? — KE, Milwaukee, WI

As long as it still cooks, it’s probably fine. Leakage of microwaves can only occur if the cooking chamber has holes in its metal walls. These walls include the metal grid over the front window and the seals around the door. If the metal grid is intact and the door still appears to close properly, the oven shouldn’t leak any more microwaves now than it did 20 years ago. However, to set your mind at ease, you can have it tested or test it yourself. www.comforthouse.com sells a simple microwave leak tester for $30. You can probably find similar devices at local appliance stores or, for a more accurate and reliable test, take your microwave oven to a service shop for inspection with an FDA certified meter. [Note added 1/10/97: I have finally found one microwave oven that leaks enough that a simple tester identifies it as dangerous—it’s the microwave oven in my laboratory and I’ve moved it around frequently and taken it apart several times for my classes. Evidently, I damaged its door hinges during my experiments because the door now sags a bit and doesn’t seal properly. The tester worked nicely in finding the leaks.]

Were microwaves invented for the microwave oven?

While microwaves were known long before anyone know how to produce them efficiently, they became important during World War II as the basis for radar. The ability to detect and locate enemy aircraft at long distances and at night was crucial to the defense of Allied cities during the war. The 1945 discovery that microwaves also cooked food was an accidental offshoot of radar development.

What is the purpose of the grid on the glass door of the microwave oven?

The metal grid reflects microwaves and keeps them inside the oven. Electromagnetic waves are unable to pass through holes in conducting materials if those holes are significantly smaller than their wavelengths. The wavelengths of visible light are very short, so light has no trouble passing through the holes in this grid. But the microwaves used in the oven have wavelengths of about 12.4 cm and are unable to propagate through the grid. Thus you can see the food cook while the microwaves are trapped inside the oven.

Can we add a section to a microwave oven that gets the food or drinks cold? – MH

Not without adding a full-blown refrigerator. While it’s relatively easy to add thermal energy to food or drink, it’s much harder to remove that thermal energy. Since energy is conserved, the thermal energy that you remove from the food must be transferred elsewhere. Since heat (moving thermal energy) normally flows from a hotter object to a colder object, you must make something colder than the food before the heat will leave the food. While it’s possible to cool an object to a temperature lower than its surroundings, this cooling process requires a heat pump, a device that actively pumps heat from a cold object to a hot object (against its natural direction of flow). A refrigerator is such a heat pump.

Does the volume in the cooking chamber of a microwave oven affect the rate at which it cooks the food? In other words, which cooks faster, a small microwave oven or a large one? – RP

The size of a microwave oven’s cooking chamber should have little or no effect on how quickly it cooks food. The oven’s magnetron tube delivers a certain amount of microwave power to the cooking chamber and virtually all of that power will eventually be absorbed in the food. It may take a few moments longer for a large cooking chamber to fill with microwaves when you first start the oven, but soon the food inside it will be exposed to the same intensity of microwaves as food cooking inside a smaller microwave oven with a similar magnetron power.

On the other hand, the magnetron’s power does affect cooking speed so that an oven with a more powerful magnetron will cook food faster than one with a less powerful magnetron. The speed of cooking in a microwave oven also depends on how much food it contains because the food shares the microwave power. In general, doubling the amount of food in the microwave doubles the cooking time.

What is a microwave and what does it do? — AH, Rochester, MN

A microwave is an electromagnetic wave with a frequency and a wavelength that are intermediate between those of a radio wave and those of light. An electromagnetic wave consists of both an electric field and a magnetic field. These two fields travel together in space and perpetually recreate one another as the wave moves forward at the speed of light. An electric field is a phenomenon that exerts forces on electric charges, while a magnetic field is a phenomenon that exerts forces on magnetic poles. Electric and magnetic fields are intimately connected, so that whenever an electric field changes, it creates a magnetic field and whenever a magnetic field changes, it creates an electric field. By combining a changing electric field and a changing magnetic field, the electromagnetic wave uses their abilities to create one another to form a self-perpetuating entity—the wave’s changing electric field creates its changing magnetic field and its changing magnetic field creates its changing electric field.

If you were to freeze an electromagnetic wave at one instant and look at its structure in space, you would find that its electric and magnetic fields had a periodic spatial structure. Just as a water wave has crests and troughs, an electromagnetic wave has spatial fluctuations in its two fields. The distance between adjacent “crests” in either one of these fields is that wave’s wavelength. Different types of electromagnetic waves have different wavelengths. Radio waves have long wavelengths that range from about 1 meter to hundreds or even thousands of meters and visible light has short wavelengths that range from about 400 billionths of a meter (400 nanometers) to about 750 billionths of a meter (750 nanometers). Microwaves are those electromagnetic waves with wavelengths between 1 millimeter and 1 meter. The microwaves used in microwave cooking have wavelengths of 12.2 centimeters.

Microwaves are often used to carry information in satellite communication and telephone microwave links. Whenever you see a dish antenna (a satellite dish or a communication link dish on a building or tower), you are looking at a microwave system. Astronomers use radio telescopes to look at microwave emissions from celestial objects. Radar bounces microwaves from objects to determine where they are or how fast they’re moving. And microwave ovens use microwaves to add thermal energy to water molecules in order to heat food.