What gets hotter - the "cold turkey" (10 degrees K) which is put into the freezer... or the identical turkey put into the microwave oven?
A no-brainer unless we qualify the question to add... IF each turkey gets the same number of characteristic photons from its appliance? Assume the characteristic photon of the freezer is sub-IR at minus 5 degrees C. and the oven photon is at a frequency of 2.45 Ghz and no other conductive energy transfer is applicable. Obviously from the complicated "setup" of this poser - anyone with a bit of sophistication can guess that it is somewhat of a "trick" question, but do they really know why the freezer turkey heats up faster? Chefs, like sailors, would not necessarily make good "natural" physicists. This may be because of a particular mind-set, which is sensory. The energy with which sailors are accustomed to dealing, the sea, expresses itself in a radically different way than does the energy of physics - the photon. The longer the ocean wave, for instance, the more powerful the storm which caused it, and the harder it is to deal with in a small boat. Just the opposite is true with regard to the photon "waves." It's interesting that the two equations most famously associated with Einstein both assert equivalencies involving energy: E = mc^2 and E = hn, relate energy to two fundamental constants, lightspeed and Planck's constant. Of course, the latter equation is really an assertion about the partitioning of energy, since it refers to an elemental and "unbreakable" unit (or quantum) of energy - which is the photon. But that ratio, and the relationship of energy to wavelength is not the whole story in being able to maximize energy transfer to a particular target. A paradigm sensory shift happens in E = hn when we deal with two different systems - one where n (frequency) is a spectrum "spread", such as is visible light, and the second where n is "coherent" which means that all the photons are at *exactly* the same n. The result of this paradigm shift being that microwaves, which are not really heat waves, but can be better described as "cold waves" since their photon represents a temperature which is generally colder than any place on earth even the arctic, BUT which can nevertheless transfer and concentrate a lot of net energy rapidly into an appropriate target. But this transfer effect is more a function of "intensity" than underlying power. To try to verbalize this another way, a smaller amount of "intense cold" (if coherent and fully absorbed) can raise the temperature of a target faster than a much larger amount randomized heat waves, which are not efficiently absorbed. In the case of the "cold turkey" both sub IR and microwaves are easily fully absorbed, whereas higher energy such as lightwaves would not be absorbed but blocked by a surface interface. And... (getting a little closer to the ultimate point of this post) if we took the average "freezer photon" and made it coherent, then that turkey would heat up incredibly fast - like a microwave oven on steroids. Imagine heating a frozen TV dinner in 5 seconds instead of 5 minutes - it could happen with coherent terawaves (if not preceded by an explosion), which kind of oven, unfortunately does not exist as a commercial resource now. Light (visible) is the frequency spectrum electromagnetic wave with which are most familiar, giving an energy per photon for which we have a visceral understanding - i.e. sunburn. Radio waves at the frequency of the household microwave oven are interesting in this context, as they are far weaker - but coherent. That is, each photon of visible light can be a million times more energetic than the microwave photon but we may not appreciate that in a sensory way until the light itself becomes equally "coherent"... as it does in a laser. The trouble with higher frequency waves like light which have a higher net energy, is that they may just heat the surface, or else if really high frequency - just pass right through your target object or reflect off of it. X-rays, for example would go through organic material and not be "felt" anywhere near as intensely as IR, which we associate with heat. This is why one often hears it said in regard to radioactive material - if it feels "warm" you are already in deep trouble. All of this as a preamble to the percieved *need* for a terahertz light source. And, as they say on the streets, need is a mother...." or was that "necessity is the mother of invention" ? For the inventor out there, the motherless ones needing a "goal" which they can immediately relate to (such as being expressed as "$$$$" ) then just think for a moment about this previous statement. "Imagine heating a frozen TV dinner in 5 seconds instead of 5 minutes" - it could (?) happen with coherent terawaves, which unfortunately do not exist as a commercial resource now, so no one only really has much more than a glimpse at all the potential applications... Not to mention the application which has currently infatuated this particular observer... that being the distinct possibility that terawaves, which "just" coincidentally may happen to exist precisely at a QM resonance point for deuterium condensation in a metal matrix, could eventually be the "enabling technoloy" which is required to bring LENR out of the lab and into everyday life... Jones Eat your heart out, James Burke. Did you ever imagine that the WWW itself would be the "enabling technology" for not just faster connections but a paradigm shift in connections: that being "instigated connections" (as opposed to partially random ) ... as in providing the "enabling technology" for the free-flow of unedited (maybe even pathological) information, providing the "enabling technology" for allowing a few fringe observers to suggest an "enabling technology" for such societal needs as "faster TV diners," thus providing the "enabling technology" (hopefully) for a few inventors to discover a robust kind of LENR which wll eventaually wean an increasingly dependent World off of its unholy reliance on fossil fuels... <G> ... stayed tuned for that episode. I hope it is scheduled before the twelfth ...
