By Anupum Pant
If you think about it, wouldn’t it be a great idea to make a home heater that would make humans feel hot without wasting energy to heat the air that surrounds them. Just like a microwave oven cooks meat without heating the surrounding air, this should in theory work to warm humans with smaller intensities, so they don’t get cooked. I know people are just too paranoid about microwaves, but trust me they are not that bad. But how safe can a microwave home heater possibly be?
This is what a Harvard physicist suggested in the 80s. At that time, according to Professor Robert V. Pound, microwaves could certainly be used to just make the humans feel the warmth, without heating the whole air in the house. This according to him, would cut electricity costs greatly and might serve as a great tool to deal with the world energy crisis. This article of his got published in the journal of science.
He said:
If a microwave oven is installed in a house, the waves would heat the people and not the air. So with the surrounding air remaining at low temperatures, the humans would still feel toasty.
A Harvard physicist said that. How wrong could an accomplished person like that be? Well, doctors urged you to smoke cigarettes in the old times. So, there is a lot he could have gotten wrong at that time. Also, since I haven’t come across any homes installed with microwave heating, even if they purportedly could offer a much cheaper alternative, there must definitely be something wrong with the professor’s idea.
This is what I think. Firstly, if anything like that was even possible, the whole house would have to be covered with metal foils to keep the waves in. Also, every thing in the house would have to be microwave safe. With electronics and silver ware of all sorts, that possibly doesn’t seem like a very good idea any more.
That is not even what could be the most wrong thing about it. The microwaves wouldn’t heat the whole human body uniformly. With the body containing different amounts of water, they’d certainly get heated differently, with different rates. In my view, if there’d be something like that, due to the high water content, your eyes would pop first.
And then all your tech, made of metal etc. would have to be microwave safe. No, that’s not happening.
via [Freelance star]