Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How do microwaves work?

Episode Date: September 10, 2019

Find out how microwaves work with Daniel and Jorge Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, Jorge, I know you like to joke that any physics question I ask you could be answered with The Big Bang. I think that's a pretty solid answer for any science question, you know? Like, why does this happen? It's all because of the Big Bang. Man, you are like a deep philosopher of science sometimes. I think I just heard you say the Big Bang too many times. Well, I don't mean to burst your bubble, but I think I finally found a question where the Big Bang is not a valid answer. What could not be due to the Big Bang?

Keep listening. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel Weissan. I'm a particle physicist, and I owe my existence to the Big Bang. As do we all. As does this podcast. That's right, even this podcast. So welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. Welcome to our podcast in which we explore things. big and small. That's right. Things out there, big and small, out there in the universe, and even right here in our homes, in our everyday lives, something that we use almost too much, I think,

perhaps. That's right. One of the joys of being a physicist is looking around you all the time and wondering how does that thing work. And that extends to the cosmos and the stars and the big questions of the universe, but it also applies to just stuff happening around you. You know, why does that leaf dance that way? Why does the ball bounce this way? How does the ball bounce this way? I make this thing happen? Or how does this thing in my kitchen do its thing? How does this magic happen? There's crazy physics all around us, right? And potentially dangerous sources of radiation in our own homes. That's right. Basically, the whole universe is crazy physics. I mean, that's a good way to summarize the whole universe. That's an alternate answer to the Big Bang. Crazy physics. Why does this particle

do that? It's just crazy physics. It's better than the answer being crazy physicists, right? Physicist is crazy because of crazy physics. I'm not sure about the cause and effect there, yeah. It might be the becoming a physicist makes you a little bit crazy because you see the world through different eyes, right? Everything you look at, you try to understand in terms of an equation or a model or try to dig down and understand how this emergent phenomenon can be explained by tiny little particles bumping up against each other.

Yeah, so on this podcast, we usually tackle very big topics like the size of the universe or where did the big bang come from. but sometimes we like to tackle smaller topics or topics that are in everyone's everyday life. Yeah, so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling something that everyone has in their kitchens. So today on the program, we'll be asking the question. How does a microwave work?

Or I guess more specifically, how does a microwave oven work? You know what a microwave is. You put the stuff in there. You press the button. It spins. It beeps. It turns around.

and it comes out hot, right? But how does that actually happen? What's the physics that's going on there? Yeah, how do microwaves work? I mean, we've had them around for a long time, it seems, right? To heat up our foods, our snacks, and our hot pockets. They first appeared in kitchens in the late 50s, I think. So it's been decades.

You've had these around for a while, huh? Yeah, and like many useful inventions, they were discovered by accident. They were discovered by a physicist, poking around, trying to do one thing, discovered something else useful. Another way to save time, right, for a lot of people. It's sort of a convenience appliance. Like, if you were to heat things up in the regular oven, it would just take much longer. But in a microwave, things seem to get hot really fast.

Yeah. And, you know, I don't want to take any of the steam out of this podcast episode, but I'll admit that the microwave in our kitchen at home has been broken for about five years. What? Yeah, it's built into the double oven thing we have. So to get it repaired, we have to replace the whole thing. So we just sort of put it off forever. And the truth is, we haven't really missed it or never really noticed.

You've lived without a microwave for five years? It is possible, people. Oh, my God. You can live without a microwave, yes. Turns out you can make popcorn on the stove. So what do you use it for? It's like storage? You store some pots and pans in it or?

For storage. Did you clean it before you abandoned it? I wonder if you opened this now. It's never been cleaned. No, you know, our pet rats like to hang out in there. No, we don't use it for anything. It just uses up space in the kitchen. Wow.

So if you have to heat up a quick thing, you just, what do you do? You eat it cold? No, we got a toaster oven. We got an electric water kettle. We got a stove top. That serves for mostly everything. Yeah. Turns out life is possible without a microwave.

But it's a fascinating object in so many people's kitchen and lots of people swear by it. So I thought it would be interesting to dig into the physics of it. And it turns out that very few people know how a microwave works, and the people who think they know how microwave works probably have it wrong. Yeah, I was reading through these notes, and I realized I have no idea how a microwave oven works, or I thought I did, but it turns out that I don't. And so that sort of brings up an interesting question. Like, there's so many people out there who use a microwave.

Almost nobody knows how it works. How come nobody seems to have spent any time thinking about it or wondering about it? Is it just physicists who want to understand, like, how this stuff around? does work, then everybody else is sort of happy to just press a button and get their popcorn? I wonder if it's a generational thing, you know? At this point, most people grew up with the microwave, you know? It's sort of like, it's just there. It's like nobody ever sits around wondering how a refrigerator works or how a pencil works, you know?

I think my kids ask me how refrigerators work. I want to know how things worked that existed in the universe before I came to be. I'm not like, Big Bang, that's old news. I'm only interested in new stuff. It's not trending. The Big Bang, it's not trending. I don't care. So it's something that everyone is probably familiar with and maybe most people own,

but we were wondering how many people out there know how a microwave actually works. That's right. So I walked around the streets of Aspen, Colorado, a place where people come from all over the world with all sorts of different backgrounds, and I asked folks if they knew how a microwave worked. Don't most people in Aspen, Colorado, own multiple microwaves? They probably own multiple microwave companies. That's what I mean.

And they say, I don't care as long as the share price keeps going up. Yeah, so think about it for a second. If you were skiing out there in Asmond, Colorado, and then a scruffy physicist asks you, hey, how does a microwave work? What do you think you would answer? Here's what people had to say. Nope. Best guess.

Microwaves. Electricity passing through food? No. Radiation. Electricity turned into something, well, it's not radiation. It genetically modifies your food. Yeah, it has a radon tube. A radon tube.

And how does that heat up your food? The moisture in the food is what caused the heat up. Yes, electricity. Thence it's light of the core to heat up. Can you explain that just English? He knows the Japanese. Okay. Something about electricity coming down in waves.

You'd say, start. And then what happens? Microwaves. No, I do not know. Do you know how a microwave works? I do Oh, how it works Maybe not

We press plus 30 seconds button, then start All right It seems that those microwave company owners in Aspen don't really have much of an idea of how they work Well, I was amazed at the huge variety of answers

I mean we got radiation, we got genetic modification to the foods There was that one guy who seemed to understand how a microwave worked but he could only explain it in Japanese to his wife. Well, that's the same with me. I know how it works, but I only know how it works in Japan. I like the guy who said, how does a microwave work?

You just press the start button. That's how it works, right? I know. Like I was asking for tips, like, help, I need to use the microwave, and I don't know how it works. Please, give me advice. Tell me, my food is cold. Like I'm out here on the street with my recorder

looking for tech support for my microwave. Well, he would have been helpful, yeah. Yeah, and you know, and you heard a couple of people say what I think is a common trope, which is that the microwave heats up the water, right? Which I think is a common misunderstanding. We'll get into it later, but that's not how a microwave works. Right, yeah, that's what I thought too. And also, some people said it has to do with electricity.

Like somehow it uses electricity to zap. your food. Yeah. And, you know, it does use electricity. It's not like it's a coal-powered microwave or something. Sorry. Steampunk. The steampunk microwave, wouldn't that? Like, you have all the steam, but you convert it to microwaves. Yeah, somebody out there probably has done that. You know, on our recent episode about gravitons, I wondered out loud what a gravitron was. And that moment in our podcast, I think might have generated the most listener response because I got dozens of emails from people who had ridden in their childhood a Gravitron, an amusement park ride. So that generated the most emails of anything we've ever done so far. As you know that, because that was on the latest season

of Stranger Things. Yes, you're right. There was a scene in the Gravitron. So if anybody out there knows of a coal-powered microwave, please write in and send us a picture. I'd love to see it. Well, so not a lot of people know how a microwave works, and I didn't know apparently how a microwave works. So let's get into it, but maybe first would you talk about how normal ovens work, like the ones with gas or the ones that are electric, not the microwave kind? So a normal oven basically works by heating the air inside the oven, and then the air heats your food, right? And you'll notice this because if you open a normal oven,

you get like a rush of hot air that comes out and burns your face, right? Whereas if you open a microwave, you don't notice that. In a regular oven, you like you put the energy into the air, and then you rely in the air to give the energy to your food. That's right. And remember on a microscopic level, what's happening is that the air is heating up and that means that the air molecules are getting faster, right? We talked about temperature in another episode.

It's sort of a crazy concept. But the simplest idea is that you're just speeding up the air molecules. So they're zooming around faster and faster inside the oven. And sometimes they bounce into your food and they deposit some energy. So they heat up the molecules in your food, right? Maybe your oven is gas and has little flames or it has a heating element if it's an electric oven. And that heats up the air, right, which speeds up those molecules and they bounce into the molecules of your food and heat them up. Yeah.

When you put it like that, it seems really inefficient to think about ovens like that. Like you have to heat up the air and then the air, you have to wait for the air to bump into your food. And then it only bumps into the surface, right, the outer skin of your food. So that's why it takes a while to heat up. in a regular oven. That's right. And they're super inefficient in my house because every time I'm baking something,

somebody will walk by the oven every five minutes and open it up. Ooh, what's in there? And then all the hot air rushes out and you've got to heat up the whole oven again. I'm surprised your regular oven works, Daniel. I'm going to put a lock on it or something. But yeah, that's exactly what.

I thought you were in cooking over a campfire every night. That's exactly why the food in your oven heats from the outside in because the outside is the only part exposed to the air. Right. So the outside of your food, the outside layer gets heated by the air and the inside gets heated by the outside. Like you're cooking a turkey, the skin gets hot first and then the heat of the skin cooks the next layer. And that layer cooks the next layer and that layer cooks the next layer. So it's sort of like heat propagating through the turkey, but has to start from the outside. That's the hottest part. Right. And that's kind of, then that's kind of good sometimes because that's where you get, you know, crunchy crusts. Yeah, exactly. You get this browning effect from the hot air,

and that's because the air can get to a sort of a high enough temperature to give you like caramelization, and that gives you the good browning stuff. And, you know, sometimes you want that. You want the outside to be crunchier and hotter than the inside. Like for a turkey, you don't want the breast meat to get up to a certain temperature because then it gets dry, but you do want the outside at a higher temperature. So for things where you want the outside hotter and the inside a little bit cooler,

a convection oven is perfect. Okay, so it doesn't sound super efficient. But it's an old, old-y-timely, trusted technology. We've been using ovens for thousands and thousands of years. It doesn't break down like your microwave. That's right. I mean, in the old days, before we had gas ovens and electric ovens, an oven was just like an enclosed space with a bunch of burning wood in it, right? And people still do that, like a pizza oven, right, can get up to 800 degrees or 900 degrees.

And you see these things, they're just like, they got wood burning in the back. And it's just an enclosed space to trap the heat. because if you have a fire without walls around it, then the heat just rises. You can cook over it, but it's much less efficient. So you just enclose it to sort of capture the heat where you are, and that's an oven. That's all an oven is is a heat source

and something to capture it so that the air stays hot. All right, that's how normal ovens work. So let's get into microwaves. But first, let's take a quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control.

And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Do this. Pull that. Turn this. It's just... I can do my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what?

Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Siss, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro. Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel

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podcast. I had this like overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick, I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through

this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't want to have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and the traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're talking about microwave ovens and how they work. So, Daniel, break it down for us. How does a microwave oven work?

Well, maybe we first should figure out, we should talk about what a microwave is, right? Like, what is this thing? We tackled the word oven. Now we're tackling the word micro wave. But first, let's break it down into micro and wave. What is the letter M really mean? What is letter I really mean? Three hours later, we'll get to the answer.

It's pretty simple, actually. A microwave is just a kind of light, right? Remember that all these things, gamma rays, x-rays, UV light, visible light, radio waves. These are all just parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's not like a special kind of ray or a special kind of particle or, you know, laser. It's just plain old light. It's just plain old electromagnetic radiation, right? And a microwave just refers to the wavelength of that radiation.

So remember, the thing that differentiates a gamma ray from ultraviolet light, from visible light, from x-rays or radio waves is just the frequency of the wiggling, right? All these things are electromagnetic fields oscillating up and down and left and right. And the speed at which they oscillate, how many times they oscillate per second, right? Or equivalently the wavelength of their oscillation, right, how long that wave is. determines which one it is. And so radio waves are the ones with the really long wavelengths. Like there are radio waves that have links like, you know, dozens and dozens of meters.

Microwaves, it's sort of a confusing name because microwaves are radio waves with shorter wavelengths. So down to about 12 centimeter. But it's only shorter compared to radio waves, which have like dozens of meters of wavelength. They're not short compared to like light, visible light, which is like nanometers. They're not microscopic. That's right. They're only micro compared to really big radio waves. Oh, that's a scale thing, huh?

So they're microwaves are actually like megawaves compared to like the visible light that we all see every day. Yeah, which is wavelengths of like hundreds of nanometers, which is tiny, right? These things have wavelengths that are, you know, 12 centimeters. That's, you know, the size of your hand or something like that. So these things have real physical wavelength. Wait, are you telling me that physicists name. something in a confusing way? What?

Are you telling me that you're surprised that physics's name would be confusing? Tushay, tushay. Anything named in the pre-Horhe epoch is defined to be confusing because you were not involved. Yeah, the PJ era. We don't like to talk about it.

It's a dark period in the history of physics, but it does exist. Yeah. Okay, so there are microways, but they're not really micro. They're actually like, you know, 12 centimeters. It's sort of like the length of your hand. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that's what a microwave is. And then you might wonder like, all right, but, you know, how does that heat my food?

If I shine my flashlight at a turkey, it doesn't cook it, right? If I take an x-ray if my turkey doesn't cook it? Well, it depends on your flashlight, doesn't it? If your flashlight is the Large Hajon Collider, then yeah, maybe. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's not that regular light. doesn't cook. It's just that it doesn't cook as well. Yeah, that's true. It does deposit some energy. It just doesn't have that much energy on it. But essentially, the way a microwave oven works is that it blasts your food with microwave radiation, right? Which, again, radiation, it sounds scary, but it's really just light. Yeah, light is an example of radiation. So this is just another kind of electromagnetic radiation. And you might be wondering, like, well, okay,

why does this specific frequency of radiation tend to heat up your food? Why does that do that, right? Well, one thing you'll notice is that when you open up a microwave oven after you've cooked your food, right, that the air inside the microwave oven is not hot. So a lot of people think that the way a microwave works is that the microwave radiation heats up just the water inside the food. Yeah, I've heard of that, yeah. Like somehow there's something like it only heats up the water molecules or preferentially the water molecules in your food. That's kind of why like if you stick a plastic plate, it's not going to heat up as much as if you put a, you know, a hot dog. And there is some truth to that, right?

A microwave will heat up some kinds of food more than other kinds of food. But the reason that some people give is that they think that a microwave has like a resonant frequency with the water. Remember, microscopically, water is made out of molecules and those molecules can do things like spin and vibrate. And like all atomic stuff, it's quantum mechanical, which means it can only accept radiation at certain frequencies. Like we talked about how atoms can absorb wavelength,

certain wavelengths of light and not other wavelengths of light. So some people, I think, imagine that this is what's happening inside your microwave, that water can absorb frequency at this wavelength, and the air and the other stuff can't, right? So that's the common misconception. Right. And when you say resonant frequency,

you mean kind of like water, it's the idea that water has kind of an internal bounciness to it, right? Like an internal, like, frequency. it likes to bounce around, like a guitar string. Yes, exactly. And it's true of every atom, right? They do have special frequencies at which they like to vibrate. And it depends on the atom and how it's built and how the electrons are organized and all that stuff.

And so they do have special resonant frequencies that they do like to absorb radiation. But that's not what's happening here. That's not the way that a microwave works. It's not. It's not. Definitely not. No, it's a totally different but really fascinating mechanism. You just nuked my brain here.

I just press to start. My illusion of understanding here. Okay, so it's not making a resonance with the water. So how is it, but it is sort of related to water, right? Like there's something about water molecules that microwaves are kind of specially tuned to a heat up. Yeah. And it's a different process. It's called dielectric heating.

Essentially, it's because water molecules, they have the same number of positive and negative charges, but they're not exactly balanced in the same place, right? means that one part of the water molecule is a little more positive and another part is a little more negative. So overall, there's a little bit of separation of the charges. So what happens when one side of water is more optimistic? The other one's more pessimistic. That's right. That's right. You got the upside and the downside. Some water molecules are like, this glass is half full of us. The other half is like, these glasses have empty of us. It's a big debate. But what happens when electromagnetic waves come by, remember, electromagnetic waves interact with things that have charge, right? Negative and positive charge. And so what they do is that one part of the molecule

gets pushed one way and the other part that has the other charge gets pushed the other way. You're saying like a water molecule is kind of like a little magnet where one end is sort of negative and the other side is positive. So it's not like perfectly even. Yeah, it's not, it's kind of like a magnet in that there are north and south, right? But in this case, we're talking about electric charges and they're positive and negative and the waves come by and they tweak it and they tweak it differently because the charge is different on one side than the other right you've it's overall neutral but you've separated the charges a little bit so that you have a positive and negative so the wave gives the two sides a different kick right in different directions and that spins it but the thing

about a wave is that it's a wave which means it goes up and then it goes down so now the other part of the wave comes by and it spins at the other direction and so essentially what happens when these waves come by a water molecule is they spin them back and then forth and then back and then forth. And so they're sort of like they're spinning all the little molecules, all the little water molecules in your food gets spun back and forth by this microwave. So it's not like an internal vibration. It's more like a, but it is sort of a resonance, right, like in how it spins.

Like it likes to spin at that frequency. No, it's not a special resonance. It's just, it's the fact that it has this anything in your food that has a electric dipole will get spun this way. It just so happens that water is pretty good at getting spun that way because the arrangement of the atoms inside the water molecule gives it a larger electric dipole than things like plastic. Which we're not supposed to eat. Which we're not supposed to eat. And so what happens, you heat up all the water molecules and they got a lot of energy now, right? And then they spread the energy to the stuff around it. So you're cooking a turkey, right? You heat up

the water molecules and then the heat spreads out, right, from the water molecules to the other stuff that didn't get sort of mixed up or spun around. I'm sort of thinking about it like to cook something with a microwave, you take like a billion tiny little spoons and you stir up each of the little water molecules. You're like shaking. You're shaking each molecule. Yeah, exactly.

You're shaking their booties and they're dancing, and they spread their energy out to other stuff. And so that's how the non, the stuff in your food that doesn't have an electric dipole also gets heated up. So it is sort of, there is something about water, but it doesn't have to do with this sort of internal resin. It's just really, it's just, it just has this kind of a magnet-like structure. Yeah, exactly.

It's the electric dipole structure. And the fascinating thing is that for this to work, the water molecules have to be able to wiggle, right? The key is you're like turning it and then turning it back and turning it and turning it back. So this is something I didn't understand very well, but that frozen water is harder to heat up in the microwave than liquid water because the molecules can't wiggle as much because they're trapped in this ice crystal. It's frozen too, right? So it's just naturally harder to heat up because it's already cold. That's true. It takes longer to heat up to a certain temperature, but it absorbs microwaves less efficiently

when it's frozen than when it's liquid. So it takes in the energy, but because they can't move, that energy doesn't get absorbed? Yeah, exactly. The wave comes by and it tries to wiggle that little water molecule because it has that electric dipole, but it just doesn't get wiggled as much. and so it doesn't absorb as much energy. And then, you know, later, when it's freer because you melted it a little bit, then it can get mixed up even better.

Wow. Imagine, you know, imagine trying to take a frozen block of water and mixing it up until it melts, right? That's not going to be very efficient. But you could put a spoon into a bowl of water and mix it around until it got really hot. That's more efficient. And I guess it's convenient because most of the things we eat have water in it, right? That's right, and that's a convenient overlap between our diet and the physics. Another misconception that people have is I think that people think that microwaves cook their food from the inside out

or that it cooks it totally evenly, right, that it doesn't really matter where it is because it's this mysterious, quantum mechanical thing that's happening. So you're saying it doesn't heat up from the inside? No, it doesn't actually, because these microwaves penetrate the food, but they only penetrate a few centimeters. They can't get all the way in. Their energy gets absorbed before they get really deep into the food. food. And so the stuff that's cooking the inside of your turkey in a microwave is still the outside of the turkey, right? All you can do is heat the outside and then the inside

gets heated by the next layer. And a lot of people have microwaves with like a defrost setting on it. And you know, you press the button, it does it automatically. What it actually does often is that it runs for a little while and then it just turns off. It looks like it's doing something, but it turns off the microwaves and it just sort of lets the heat flow around for a little bit. Oh, I see. So it doesn't cook. The outside doesn't cook. It's just, you know, heats it up and bursts. Yeah, exactly. And different parts of your food will get hot differently. And the reason is, of course, you know, different parts of different amounts of water. But also, it's really difficult to get an even dose of radiation, right? It's generating this radiation using a little cavity called a magnetron. And it's really hard to get like an exactly even density of, microwave radiation inside your microwave. And so you have hot spots and cold spots.

Yeah, well, I always thought that the reason that the inside get hotter than the outsides was because, you know, I imagine my food is getting bombarded by microwaves from all directions. And it's the center of my food that's getting hit by all directions more than any other part. You know what I mean? Like it's surrounded. So all the, all the microwave sort of concentrate in the middle.

Isn't that the reason why maybe the center would hear? heat up more? Well, that would be true if the microwaves are sort of aimed at the center from some source on the outside, but that's not how they're generated. This one source, this magnetron, which is a pretty cool name, it generates all the radiation, and then there's a little wave guide that just sort of dumps it out into your microwave. And more expensive, fancier ones have more complicated or double magnetrons to try to make it even. But the best thing you can do to get an even cooking of your food is to put it, to make it spin. So it sort of rotates your food through the hot spots and the cold spots.

But you shouldn't just put it in the center, right? If you just put it right in the center of your turn table, then all your food is doing is spinning around. It's not actually moving through the hot and the cold spots. All right. Let's get into how microwaves actually make the microwaves. But first, let's take a quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane.

and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control.

And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just... I can do my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of... questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who

lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this like overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just want to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast season two takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is

National Suicide Prevention Month. So join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I wouldn't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission.

I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of The Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper

into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

and those amazing vivas you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the, You know what I'm me?

Yeah. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, so let's get into how a microwave makes microwaves. And you're saying that it uses a couple of transformer. This alien came to Earth and transformed from a killer robot into a kitchen appliance. And its name was Magnetron. His name was Magnetron.

No, and this is why microwaves were discovered by physicists. There's a guy Percy Spencer, and he was playing with magnetrons because he was interested in using microwaves for like navigation and for radar. I think it was probably funded by like the U.S. Navy or the Air Force or something. For like communications, like to transmit stuff. Yeah, to either transmit stuff or just detect. Like, you know, where are the rocks and where's the coastline and this kind of stuff, you know, useful radar stuff.

Where are the enemy ships and all that stuff? And he had built this magnetron. And a magnetron is just something that generates microwave radiation. How does a magnetron make microwaves? How do you make microwaves in general? Well, the way to make radiation is, you know, you find something in nature, which normally produces that radiation, you know, because it has a resonant frequency. It likes to wiggle in exactly the right way to make that radiation.

you can do that or you can build a cavity that makes it so that electrons have exactly that resonant frequency like you build a little metal box and so that when electrons go in there they like to shake around at exactly the frequency you want to generate and that's essentially what a magnetron is kind of like a flute yeah exactly it's a lot like a musical instrument you know and a musical instrument the shape and the size of the cavity determines exactly the acoustic waves that you can generate from it, right? You can shorten the cavity or lengthen the cavity by putting your fingers on the keys, exactly. So a magnetron is just a cavity where you shoot electrons, you have magnetic, and you have magnetic

fields in there in order to generate exactly the right kind of frequency. And you could generate different frequencies by having a different size cavity. So you shoot the electrons in and they all sort of sync up and then out comes this kind of synchronized ray of light, right? Yeah, of radiation. And for those of you know any quantum mechanics, you know that when you create a confined space, like an infinite well for those of you have taken physics,

that's when you get quantum mechanical effects. So you get special resonant frequencies, energy levels, for example. So the same way you have energy levels around an atom, you can have energy levels inside a cavity. And so you get electrons in there, and they like to wiggle at this energy level, and then they jump down an energy level and give off that radiation, which is then at the frequency that you want.

So the microwave in my kitchen has one of these magnetrons, like a little tube? Yeah, exactly. Everybody who has a microwave has a little radiation-creating device in their microwave. But don't worry, right? That sounds crazy. Like, what? I'm exposing myself to radiation? You know, you're exposing your coffee to radiation, but also the microwave has metal box around it.

And the cool thing about electromagnetic radiation is that it's basically blocked by almost any conductor. So you have a wall of metal or even just like a grate of metal. something we call a Faraday cage, it will cancel out almost any radiation. So the microwave radiation inside your microwave is basically trapped there by the metal that goes all the way around the box. Because I think I always assumed that my microwave has like several microwave guns aiming at the middle, but you're saying there's only one tube here, like Jenner spewing out these light waves. Man, you made a funny mental image there with microwave gun,

imagining folks shooting these things at each other. not a good idea most of them have a single one yes some of them have double ones or more expensive elaborate ones might have multiple magnetrons but you only really need one and you just need to guide the radiation

using any sort of metal tube radiation will propagate down that tube into your cooking area that's pretty cool so then how did he discover the microwave he built this magnetron to try to generate microwaves you know for these other physics studies

and I guess he was hungry he was a guy who liked a snack and he had a chocolate bar in his pocket and he noticed that when he turned the thing on, literally the chocolate bar would melt. Like a couple of centimeters from his private parts. Exactly, exactly. I'm thinking, okay, you're cooking the chocolate bar.

You're also cooking the physicist. This is a chocolate-covered physicist here is what we're preparing. But yeah, that's what he noticed it and he reported it to his employer. He's like, hey, look, turns out, you know, my whole radar project didn't work, But I invented a new kind of oven for you.

Wow. We can't spy on the Russians, but hey, we can all have warmer meals. I always wonder how executives feel that way. You know, they give you money because they're looking for a certain contract, and you come back with like Teflon or microwaves, right? All these things were discovered by accident in research environments. It's called the pivot. Yeah, the pivot.

And I wonder what like amazing inventions were thrown away by small minds and executives. They're like, that's not what we asked you. to develop, put it on the shelf and go back and work on that ray gun. Make the ray gun work. And for those of you who are scared of radiation or whatever, don't worry. These things are really safe. They surround your microwave with plenty of metals. There really is no leakage.

And it's even pretty safe to put your face up against the microwave. They used to test microwaves really carefully to make sure that none of this radiation leaked out to like, you know, cook your brain. But for so many years, they were so safe they couldn't measure anything that these days they don't even bother anymore. And it's really you're just hitting it with. light. You know, it's not like you're hitting it with particles that then make

the food radioactive, right? That's not what's happening. Oh, no, no. No, it certainly does not make your coffee radioactive, although that does sound like an awesome superhero creation story. Microwave, man. He drank radioactive coffee and gained that coffee's proportional strength.

It just heats up the food, right? It doesn't make it, it doesn't give it the ability to emit radiation. No, just heats of the food. But, you know, if you were inside a microwave, it would heat up you also, right? You would literally get cooked. So they are dangerous, but only inside the microwave. Outside is not dangerous at all.

Cool. So that's how microwaves work. I feel like I've been irradiated with knowledge today. That's right. A small amount of knowledge leads to a lot of insight. So the next time you're turning on your microwave, remember, you're blasting it with radiation. That's basically just taking a little spoon to all the molecules in there that have a little dielectric field and spitting them around to heat up everything else.

So there is physics that's making your food tasting. And as a public service, just remember, contents might be hotter than expected. That's right. And, you know, some people like microwave. Some people don't like microwaves. You know, one of the limitations is that, you know, they get that crispy browniness.

But you can just, you know, put it in your toaster oven afterwards if you really want that crunchiness. Yeah, that's my strategy. Heat up the insides and then you toast the outside. On our next podcast, how do to toasters work? How to eat dinner at Jorge's house. How to fix Daniel's microwave of it. Yeah, please.

I'd love to hear that podcast for less than $10,000. All right, everyone. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio,

visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff.

Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grasias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And, of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacus Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. denial is easier complex problem solving takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts this is an iHeart podcast