How to cook your BRAINS and POP CORN at the same time!

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: SlickSnake
From American Heritage:

"The NJRC tube brought a critical benefit to the oven. As Ironfield recalls, it had ?a very modest heater power, 65 watts.? And it was about 65 percent efficient, which made it fit into a 15-amp household circuit.?

Pretty tame compared to modern 1200 watt or more microwaves. Of course, some early microwave units consumed 3kW, too!

Now, just off the top of my pointy head, I would imagine the first megnetron tubes they were using for radar research and then oven research in the 1940s were most likely the 6kW magnetrons. But for a simple oven, that kind of wattage would be insane. Most likely they were doing early oven experiments in the 3kW range, but I could not confirm this anywhere.

The reason it takes longer on some microwaves than others to pop corn is more related to the way the individual magnetrons work and the oven designs. I had a small 800 watt unit that cooked food a lot faster than an older 1600 watt one I had.

You really need the increased power of a modern microwave oven only to cook large quantities of food more evenly, not to pop a few tiny kernels of corn.

Popcorn.Org

"Popcorn's ability to pop lies in the fact that the kernels contain a small amount of water stored in a circle of soft starch inside the hard outer casing. When heated, the water expands, creating pressure within, until eventually the casing gives way, and the kernels explode and pop, allowing the water to escape as steam, turning the kernels inside out."

Welcome to the laws of physics.

Someone sure needs a reality check or another dose of one all right.

Yes, I'm aware that popcorn pops because of the water inside. That's why I made the comment about changing the specific heat of water.
I suppose a better term would have been "heat of vaporization."
Either way, once you can change the laws of physics, get back to me.
A cellphone doesn't output directional energy. If it did, then it could probably pop a kernel of popcorn.

Now stop being such a darned Googtrog all the time, sheesh.:roll:
(BTW, I've not touched Google to reply to this thread. I also will only seek Google for specifics on information I already know. I don't need to "appear" smarter than I am.)

I guess you all never noticed how warm your ears and head get after using a cell phone? They pointed out in the article with the videos they thought it could be popped due to the standing waves from the multiple cell phones proximity. And since none of us can confirm or deny this factor, how about a little less criticism of myself for simply posting this topic, fellow googtrogs?

Why yes, yes I do notice. It's because the cellphone itself heats up considerably because of the power flowing through the antenna and other electronics. I'd imagine that holding a warm piece of plastic and metal against my skin would tend to warm up said skin. Imagine that.

Originally posted by: binister
I totally believe it... Have you seen the what lies dormant inside cell phones?

I have... and it scares me

OMG! It's on Youtube so it must be real!!!!!!

Originally posted by: SlickSnake
As far as the cellphones go, they obviously have the capacity to transmit over great distances for such a lowly stated wattage. And I think they also share one other factor in common with the microwaves in that they appear to vary the power to the transmitterwhile in use. On some phones I have used in the same location, this is obvious as the signal meter goes up and down, all while remaining perfectly still, even if the phone is lying on a flat surface.

I trust you accounted for all variables between yourself and the receiver tower? Trees blowing in the wind, possibly even traffic, radio interference from other sources, atmospheric distortion, etc? That's damn impressive by itself.

Not being a cellphone engineer,.......

And when multiple phones are lying flat against a surface, depending on the surface they are on, like glass, metal or wood, it might intensify this rising and falling power output effect.

Well there you have it. Get back to us on the absorption profiles of those surfaces so we can characterize how they might affect the transmissions of a cellphone. I'd guess that you'll get a lot of the radiation passing through with no problem, otherwise you would get no reception in your house.




I just did my own little test:
Less than a teaspoon of water in a plastic spoon, with a thermocouple in it, with my cellphone pointed at it from a few inches away. I made a call and kept up activity for 2 minutes. It started at 25°C and ended at 24°C, because the room is cooler than that. If it could heat a small amount of water to boiling in a few seconds, I'd expect, at the very least a small increase in temperature from that kind of energy.

A few minutes later, I tried something else:
With the water down to 22°C, I put it against my hand. After less than a minute, it was up to 24°C, even after getting the heat through the insulating material of the plastic spoon.

If I knew a way of activating the antenna on my phone without using up minutes, I'd leave it running all night, and I bet you that there'd still be most of the water in the spoon. (My apartment is kept pretty dry, so a fair amount would evaporate naturally.)

 

[Omegachi]

OP, you're an idiot.

 

[SlickSnake]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
I just did my own little test:
Less than a teaspoon of water in a plastic spoon, with a thermocouple in it, with my cellphone pointed at it from a few inches away. I made a call and kept up activity for 2 minutes. It started at 25°C and ended at 24°C, because the room is cooler than that. If it could heat a small amount of water to boiling in a few seconds, I'd expect, at the very least a small increase in temperature from that kind of energy.

A few minutes later, I tried something else:
With the water down to 22°C, I put it against my hand. After less than a minute, it was up to 24°C, even after getting the heat through the insulating material of the plastic spoon.

If I knew a way of activating the antenna on my phone without using up minutes, I'd leave it running all night, and I bet you that there'd still be most of the water in the spoon. (My apartment is kept pretty dry, so a fair amount would evaporate naturally.)

Now Jeffy, you know I LUB you a L:heart:T, but that was only one puny little cellphone.

Just imagine what another 9 WATTS can do with 3 more! That's 12 WHOLE WATTS!

"Oh, the humanity!" :shocked:

(hides the popcorn from extinction)

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Now Jeffy, you know I LUB you a L:heart:T, but that was only one puny little cellphone.

Just imagine what another 9 WATTS can do with 3 more! That's 12 WHOLE WATTS!

"Oh, the humanity!" :shocked:

(hides the popcorn from extinction)

So what then, I'd get a temperature increase 4x the 0° increase I saw before? That certainly would be most impressive.

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: SlickSnake

Originally posted by: binister
I totally believe it... Have you seen the what lies dormant inside cell phones?

I have... and it scares me

That was pretty scary.

Almost as scary as daring to post anything in this mad cow tainted loony bin. :shocked:

You got fooled by a fake video and you want to justify it. That's okay. Really, we all make mistakes.

You're taking the comments way too personally. Everyone has their bad days. You're a gullible idiot today, but I'm sure you'll do better tomorrow

In any case, the video is definitely fake. Physics wins.

 

[Squisher]

Originally posted by: Omegachi
OP, you're an idiot.

Repost.

 

[SlickSnake]

Originally posted by: Squisher

Originally posted by: Omegachi
OP, you're an idiot.

Repost.

LOL. :laugh:

And I bet you never believed in Santa Clause, either. :frown:

For my next topic, I will post how I believe wood nymphs are REAL and include pictures of my wood, to prove it! :roll:

 

[CrimsonChaos]

Maybe there is a high-powered, concentrated heat source underneath the table? Notice in the last two videos there are sheets draped over the sides of the table. In the first one, they take video of only the top of the table, never the sides.

 

[Born2bwire]

Originally posted by: SlickSnake

Originally posted by: Born2bwire

Originally posted by: SlickSnake
I guess you all never noticed how warm your ears and head get after using a cell phone? They pointed out in the article with the videos they thought it could be popped due to the standing waves from the multiple cell phones proximity. And since none of us can confirm or deny this factor, how about a little less criticism of myself for simply posting this topic, fellow googtrogs?

Of course we can determine this for ourselves. There are a number of people on this board that are EEs, knowledgeable in antennas and electromagnetic waves. The tip of the antenna on the cell phone is a null. It should be a null, because it is wasteful to be sending power in the vertical direction, there wouldn't be a receiver directly above your head. As for the standing wave, you can't get a standing wave the way demonstrated. The wavelength is 12.2 cm but it's obvious that the cell phones are much closer than that. Plus, the phase of the signal matters for a correct resonance, but they just called each of the phones. And unlike a microwave, the cell phones do not present a resonant chamber. Energy builds up in a microwave because the radiation is being injected into a resonant chamber. Hell just for kicks, I just went and microwaved five kernels of popcorn for a minute. Got nothing, and I'm supposed to believe that a couple of cell phones pointing the nulls of their antenna at the targets are able to pop a few kernels in a matter of seconds?

I can pop a whole bag in less that 2 minutes, on my low power one. It also uses a rotating platter. I had older microwaves with high power with large dead spots in the oven and plates had to be turned 4 or 5 times to get even heating. I have not tried a few kernels, BUT I know a lot of microwaves vary the power to the magnetrons to simulate even heating. One older one I had obviously phased up and down, and you could see it in the fluctuating light bulb. And some do not run at full power until they have been on for a full minute or so, I guess to help save the magnetron from prematurely breaking or burning out from sudden high heating. The one I have now does not seem to heat unless it has been on for at least 45 seconds or so. Then the light flickers a bit, so I presume it starts working at full power.

As far as the cellphones go, they obviously have the capacity to transmit over great distances for such a lowly stated wattage. And I think they also share one other factor in common with the microwaves in that they appear to vary the power to the transmitter
while in use. On some phones I have used in the same location, this is obvious as the signal meter goes up and down, all while remaining perfectly still, even if the phone is lying on a flat surface. Not being a cellphone engineer, this may be done to initially capture the signal from the tower before the phone is answered, like locking on to it. This would make any power output claims on these phones a bit bogus if they are only giving us the lower possible power outputs. Another example is some people I know have phones that seem to regularly rise and fall in strength no matter where they are when I call them. So based on this some combos of phones may be more apt to pop corn than others based on these variable power outputs.

And when multiple phones are lying flat against a surface, depending on the surface they are on, like glass, metal or wood, it might intensify this rising and falling power output effect.

Of course, this is all just observation on my part about the various devices in question, if the videos are fake, that's it then. I may try this test in a week or so when I get the chance and report back on the results I get.

You may not be a cell phone engineer, but I am a computational electromagnetics engineer. I've worked on designing reconfigurable antennas at cell phone frequencies, I've sat in on lectures modeling the absorption of cell phone power, I've researched the effects of antennas above layered Earth.

A microwave should vary the power transmitted into the cooking chamber because a microwave is a resonant cavity. Apart from the small power that is leaked out from the seals around the door and the window, the microwave only needs to pump in power to replace that which is absorbed by the food. If it kept pumping energy into the oven at full blast it would keep raising the power in there to levels not conducive for cooking food. But with the cell phones, there is no way that they are doing a resonating chamber. The cell phones are placed too close for them to be able to provide a reliable resonance. The phase of the transmissions from the antennas would have to work exactly right for them to produce a standing wave (and that's only if they were the exact 6.1 cm apart). As for the surface effects, you do not get a very strong surface wave with a horizontal electric dipole antenna, which is what is being used here. You would want a vertical electric dipole antenna so that you can excite the Zenneck surface wave (which is how AM/FM radios work). If the table top was metal, then the cell phone's power would actually be cancelled out along the surface. The popcorn kernels would see virtually no power due to image theory. If the table top is glass or wood, then they are a low loss dielectric (wood in this case would be very dry, cellulose has little loss) and would only distort the signal slightly but not reflect much of it back up. Hell, the only way that it might actually help cook the kernels would be that the wood table results in a leaky wave mode in the wood. Some of the power that is transmitted into the wood bounces off the wood-air interface on the bottom, and then transmits back through the upper air-wood interface at the top, but this would be a fraction of the power in addition to the fact that it would be dependent upon the thickness of the table.

The primary engineering fact about cell phones is that they are designed to communicate with fixed base stations. So the goal of the engineer is to place as much of the receiving and transmitting responsibility on the base station to offload the power requirements on the cell phone. It's in the same vein on how they are able to have the Viking space probes work off of such low power and still be able to communicate with Earth, all the power and gain in the antenna link is offset onto Earth.

EDIT: As for microwaving the kernels, the microwave is going to get the oven to full power and then continue to inject only enough power to replace the power lost and absorbed. So with my roughly 850 W oven, we can ignore the fact that the resonant cavity will focus and contain the power and just assume it is free space. Thus, the power will fall off according to the inverse squared rule. If my oven is, oh, 6 in high (and ignoring the travel of the radiation from the source to the oven since that's a waveguide), then I would expect a power factor of about 36000 W/m^2 on the popcorn. With four cell phones of 1 W a piece at 6 cm away, that power factor is 1100 W/m^2. Thus, my microwave put on around 32 times as more power than those cell phones for an entire minute and failed to pop the kernels.

 

[montag451]

Hey - Its not necessarily fake.

My gf used to have an old Nokia that when it rang, if it was next to the kettle, would start the kettle up for a second!
It used to start the bread machine up as well if it was on top of the bread machine too.
Couldn't find anything else it would start though.

That was a freaky fone.

I did my manly duty and urged her to get a new one. Ah, aren't I the good fella.

 

[Eli]

Originally posted by: Born2bwire

You may not be a cell phone engineer, but I am a computational electromagnetics engineer. I've worked on designing reconfigurable antennas at cell phone frequencies, I've sat in on lectures modeling the absorption of cell phone power, I've researched the effects of antennas above layered Earth.

A microwave should vary the power transmitted into the cooking chamber because a microwave is a resonant cavity. Apart from the small power that is leaked out from the seals around the door and the window, the microwave only needs to pump in power to replace that which is absorbed by the food. If it kept pumping energy into the oven at full blast it would keep raising the power in there to levels not conducive for cooking food. But with the cell phones, there is no way that they are doing a resonating chamber. The cell phones are placed too close for them to be able to provide a reliable resonance. The phase of the transmissions from the antennas would have to work exactly right for them to produce a standing wave (and that's only if they were the exact 6.1 cm apart). As for the surface effects, you do not get a very strong surface wave with a horizontal electric dipole antenna, which is what is being used here. You would want a vertical electric dipole antenna so that you can excite the Zenneck surface wave (which is how AM/FM radios work). If the table top was metal, then the cell phone's power would actually be cancelled out along the surface. The popcorn kernels would see virtually no power due to image theory. If the table top is glass or wood, then they are a low loss dielectric (wood in this case would be very dry, cellulose has little loss) and would only distort the signal slightly but not reflect much of it back up. Hell, the only way that it might actually help cook the kernels would be that the wood table results in a leaky wave mode in the wood. Some of the power that is transmitted into the wood bounces off the wood-air interface on the bottom, and then transmits back through the upper air-wood interface at the top, but this would be a fraction of the power in addition to the fact that it would be dependent upon the thickness of the table.

The primary engineering fact about cell phones is that they are designed to communicate with fixed base stations. So the goal of the engineer is to place as much of the receiving and transmitting responsibility on the base station to offload the power requirements on the cell phone. It's in the same vein on how they are able to have the Viking space probes work off of such low power and still be able to communicate with Earth, all the power and gain in the antenna link is offset onto Earth.

EDIT: As for microwaving the kernels, the microwave is going to get the oven to full power and then continue to inject only enough power to replace the power lost and absorbed. So with my roughly 850 W oven, we can ignore the fact that the resonant cavity will focus and contain the power and just assume it is free space. Thus, the power will fall off according to the inverse squared rule. If my oven is, oh, 6 in high (and ignoring the travel of the radiation from the source to the oven since that's a waveguide), then I would expect a power factor of about 36000 W/m^2 on the popcorn. With four cell phones of 1 W a piece at 6 cm away, that power factor is 1100 W/m^2. Thus, my microwave put on around 32 times as more power than those cell phones for an entire minute and failed to pop the kernels.

Mmmm... I love the smell of pwnage.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
You may not be a cell phone engineer, but I am a computational electromagnetics engineer.
...
Blah blah blah

Yeah, like that means anything. It was a video. On. Youtube. IT HAS TO BE REAL!!!!!

You probably just looked all that up on Google anyway, you darned Googtrog you.




:laugh:


Ahh, the technical ownage is strong in this thread.

 

[Fritzo]

Here's the official Snopes on this BTW

 

[mrSHEiK124]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc-ne-nIKUY