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HOWTO, Cook an Egg With Your Cell Phone
xPosiMattx writes "Suzzanna Decantworthy published an article in her Wymsey Weekend column that described how to cook an egg with two cell phones. From the article: "Many students, and other young people, have little in the way of cooking skills but can usually get their hands on a couple of mobile phones. So, this week, we show you how to use two mobile phones to cook an egg which will make a change from phoning out for a pizza.""
6. Phone A will now be talking to Phone B whilst Phone B will be talking to Phone A.
I love urban legend as much as the next guy, but this isn't exactly true. These are cell phones not two-way radios. Phone A will be talking to a cell phone tower, whilst phone B is talking to a cell phone tower, whilst each cell phone tower is talking to the two phones respectively. There is no reason to think that you are forming some sort of ultra powerful death beam between the two phones by placing them in close proximity to one another. Having said that, if I was being attacked by a giant stay puff marshmallow man, I might give this a shot as a last resort.
Plus, the phones try really hard to minimize the amount of energy they use. 2 Watts is peak power consumption. I wouldn't recommend trying this experiment unless you want egg on your face.
Uh. Huh. Let's see ... an egg is, oh, say 50 grams. So it takes 50 calories to raise the temp of the egg by 1C. and a hard-boiled egg is more or less at equilibrium with boiling water, so the minimum would be something like 70×50 calories, and 4.2 joules/calorie, so its going to take MINIMUM 14,700 joules.
60 joules to the watt-minute. 720 joules in 12 watt-minutes. 720 joules < 14,700 joules.
Check: it takes about 1 minute for my 700 watt microwave to cook 1 egg. 700 watt-minutes is 42,000 joules. 720 joules < 42,000 joules.
I call bullshit.
1) Cell phones are the wrong frequency. They are 800, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz depending on the service. To make water heat up, you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.
Why does this myth persist? I have no idea. Whenever it pops up, someone points out that it's not true. But it still persists. It doesn't even make sense, after all - microwaves heat dry things (like... plates) as well as wet things.
Microwaves work via dielectric heating, which is just the vibration of any electric dipole due to any electromagnetic radiation. Radiation in the gigahertz band is typical, but it's a wide band. Microwave ovens use 2450 MHz because it's in the ISM band.
Water does heat best, but that's because it's one of the strongest dipoles known to exist.
Water vapor has a resonant frequency at 22.235 GHz and 183 GHz. You can see the 22 GHz line in the graph on the linked page. Also of interest is the fact that clouds don't have that absorption feature because liquid water droplets are small compared to microwave wavelengths.
Note that if water's resonant frequency was 2450 MHz, absolutely no one would use that band, as you couldn't transmit anything on it, because water vapor in the air would be opaque to it.
Doesn't matter. Phone antennas don't "beam" the radio, they broadcast omnidirectionally. Two phones equates to twice the radio energy between them.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I know you have a lot of crap on TV over there (actually pretty much exclusively crap), now you have our crap too. It may have escaped your attention that the terms "American" and "humour" are mutually exclusive. We're better than you, get over it
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
It's not about science. It's about explosions, tits and silliness.