microwave can transmute a frozen pizza into hot , melt goodness in four minutes flat , but they ca n’t rescue your melted ice - emollient sundae . Or can they ?
To falsify food , a microwave oven oven convert voltage into high - frequency electromagnetic microwaves . The molecules in food - especially piddle and avoirdupois - take up this energy and wiggle at gamy fastness , causing them to heat rapidly and warm up the surrounding food . Although chop-chop turn leftovers cold would be handy , this is a one - way operation , explains David Pozar , a professor and microwave expert at the University of Massachusetts . Microwaves can only cannonball along up atoms , not slow up them down .
Scientists do have a high - technical school method acting for slow up particle , however : optical maser . buck a moving molecule with a laser , and it will soak up the optical maser ’s photons and re - give out them every which way , make the atom to hold nearly still . Placing an atom at the conjunction of multiple beams can slow its momentum in all directions , decreasing its energy and chill it .
This drops an atom ’s temperature a couple hundred point Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit - much colder than anything you ’d want to put in your mouth - in less than a second . But because it work most expeditiously on low - denseness natural gas of atoms of a individual element , physicist Mark Raizen of the University of Texas does n’t think it will be useful for cool solid food anytime soon : “ Not unless you’re able to subsist on a thousand atomic number 11 molecule . ”
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