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Samsung Blames Galaxy SIII Burn On "External Energy Source"
MojoKid writes "Samsung has some great news for Galaxy SIII smartphone owners. As it turns out, your mobile device isn't at risk of overheating to the point where it catches on fire and burns through its casing, as a forum member at Boards.ie claimed was the case with his Galaxy SIII a couple of weeks ago. [Note: And has since retracted.] Fire Investigations UK (FIUK), an independent third-party organization, assisted Samsung with looking into the matter, and here's what they concluded: 'The energy source responsible for generating the heat has been determined as external to the device... the device was not responsible for the cause of the fire,' FIUK said in a statement. 'The only way it was possible to produce damage similar to the damage recorded within the owner's damaged device was to place the devices or component parts within a domestic microwave.'"
Microwaves create a standing wave from the point of source. The waves are at the right frequency to excite the water molecules.
They don't really cook from the inside out, they cook from the point where the waves hit the water molecules at the wave high and low points. There is a yummy experiement you can perform to demonstrate the speed of light by looking at the waves created in a microwave and see how microwaves actually work.
First: Remove the rotating glass dish at the bottom of the microwave. You need what you are putting in the microwave to remain stationary.
Second: Get twix, kit kat, or some other long thin candy bar, preferably cholcolate as it has water in it and place them on a plate in the microwave going from left to right. The Microwave source is behind the keypad and time and it shoots across the microwave to the other side.
Third: Turn on the microwave and watch.
You will see that spots will start to melt on the candy at which point you can turn off the microwave. The spots on the candy are the high and low points of the standing wave and are the points that were heated. It doens't matter inside the food or outside the food, it matters where the wave hits the food. Most people say it cooks from the inside out, but if you think about your food, the outside is a very small layer of the food while the inside is the bulk of the food. The chances of the wave focusing on the outside are insanely small compared to the chances of the heat points being on the inside.
If you want to verify the speed of light, it has to do with knowing the speed of light and equtions that deal with the frequency and amplitude of waves, you can measure the distance between the melted points on the candy bar, look up the frequency of the wave the microwave generates and verify the equations.
Oh, and don't forget to eat the candy.
http://morningcoffeephysics.com/measuring-the-speed-of-light-with-chocolate-and-a-microwave-oven/
A link to a more detailed explanation of the experiment and equations. So it isn't that a microwave cooks from the inside out, it cooks at the peaks and troughs of the standing wave, which have a much greater chance of cocentrating the heat on the inside.