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by Amadou 4616 days ago
I voted you up for truth.

But... don't discount the profound disappointment that a headline like that generates in those of us who do know how a microwave works. We were teased with the idea of learning something we thought would alter our understanding of the universe -- some sort of microwave version of the peltier effect[1] -- only to find out it was something as pedestrian as poetic license.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect

1 comments

Those who know physics would hopefully know that a cooling microwave would be a blatant violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
No it wouldn't - as long as the device, target and environment heat up as a whole. For ex, laser cooling where a laser reflects off a surface with more energy than it started with.
Oddly enough, your response is basically the same sort of overly-narrow literalism that gojomo was complaining about, just from the other direction.
No, it's not.

"reverse microwave" is correct in a sense, because as gojomo pointed out, the author meant it as a way to convey the concept of "rapid-heating appliance".

"You can't do x because of thermodynamics" actually was incorrect, and didn't take into account multiple specific instances which show that closed systems can create such results.

In soviet russia...

SCNR