Joe Rogan - Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Microwaves

leaders. I want to explore that mountain and that valley. No, we can't afford to send you out there now. We have to solve the cave problems first before anyone leaves the cave. We laugh at that. That's an absurd claim to make in caveman days. I don't know if anyone did it, but that's a crazy thought because there are solutions to your problems that might exist and time has demonstrated likely exist by leaving the cave that you can then discover. So for me, exploration is not just space. All the frontiers of the unknown, biology, chemistry, AI, you know those frontiers and then you can cross pollinate them and transform civilization. Then the last example I give and then I'll shut up because I want to hear you talk too. It's not for me. I want to hear you interact with what I'm telling you. Here's one. You ready? Okay. My physics professor in college studied the universe, loved the universe, studied gas clouds between stars and studied how would you detect the gas cloud if it's not radiating light? Well, they give off radio waves. All right. And he figured out what kind of radio waves they give off and why. And in this, he gained expertise in the nucleus of the atom and he discovered that the nucleus can resonate depending on the mass of the nucleus. It will, which means depending on what atom it is on the periodic table, it will resonate slightly differently when exposed to the same electromagnetic field. He discovered a new phenomenon in physics called nuclear magnetic resonance. It would then take a clever medical technologist to say, wait a minute, if you can distinguish one heavy atom from another, let me make a machine out of that, put your body in it, and I can then distinguish one kind of tissue from another. And thus was born the magnetic resonance imager, the MRI, arguably the most potent tool in the arsenal of modern medicine, where I can diagnose a condition in your body without cutting you open first. That is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine. By the way, the real title should be nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, but that's the other N word you're not so people don't like that. Yeah, people don't like nuclear. They're less likely to go inside the machine if the word nuclear was on it. But my point is that was a cross pollination of ideas with clever people on their frontiers, looking over the fence at discoveries that are being made. It's how we got the microwave oven that wasn't invented by a thermodynamicist microwaves. This is a World War Two attempt to communicate using microwaves. And they found out some guy's chocolate bar melted in the microwave field. And they said what happened there? And they did some more tests. And of course, the water molecule and other molecules common in food respond to microwaves, it vibrates them ferociously. And so you put food in a microwave cavity, the water content of the food vibrates, friction cooks the food. There's still people today who say, Oh, nuke this, because they think it's so fast. And they go, Oh, it's still, it's still have no fear. It's just friction. Okay, friction it. Yeah, but everybody's scared that it fucks up the food. Well, does it? No, it's just it just heats the water gets scared the woo people do. Okay, so here's the thing. There's certain foods that don't respond well, to the flipping of the water molecule. And one of them is like bread products gets hard. Yeah, it gets chewy and leathery. Yeah. And only if you like overdo if you overdo you got to do it just right. And you're still good. If you overdo it, it can get lead. That's kind of it. I'm trying to think you wouldn't grill a steak in a microwave, you would heat up the meat uniformly. And that's, that's all it would do. Cooks bacon pretty fast. Yeah. But it's a mess. And it splatters all over. So you pick the foods that are best for that situation. As you would pick the foods best, you wouldn't you wouldn't put toast in an oven at 350 degrees bread to make toast, we have toasters for that. Right. So different things in your kitchen do things best. You wouldn't make ice cream in your, you know, in your in your toaster oven. But people were afraid of microwaves, the one thing they're afraid of, it's not it's not that they're afraid of microwaves, that they're afraid that of things they don't understand. That's your point. Precisely. They're afraid that something's gonna happen to their food that makes it less good. Correct. And it's just it's it's not the not knowing that people fear. My wife's friend's mom will not eat something that comes out of a microwave. Really? She quotes that as part of what makes her healthy. She drinks a lot of water, she refuses to eat microwave food. The whole life is around not using microwave. She won't eat anything that comes out of a microwave. Okay, I'm glad that she doesn't, you know, she'll she can live a long happy life as such. She has to reheat food old school. Okay, one of the hardest thing is reheating lasagna. If you don't have a microwave. True. That's like impossible. You're gonna cook it again. You're gonna cook it again. Yeah, that's a really good point. So I think microwave ovens were invented for leftover lasagna. Yeah, just a bowl of pasta, just in general. Yeah, soup. Yeah, soup is good. Yeah. So you don't have to worry about it. It's not doing anything to it. It's not not sucking any nutrients out or adding any nuclear radiation. Correct. Okay, it has nothing to do with radiation in the normal sense, other than electromagnetic radiation. It's already light from the bulb, which tend to use radiation in the context of stuff that would hurt you. So that would be radiation of high enough energy to hurt you. And microwaves are not in that category. I never even thought about what microwaves do until this conversation. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a certain frequency of microwaves that beautifully pairs with the water molecule. And it vibrates it brilliantly. So it doesn't work for completely dried things. Yeah, that's why if you put something that has no water in it, it's not really very useful. What happens if it's white? Beef jerky. It's still some moisture in it. Correct. It's why it heats the food and not the plate. If the plate gets hot, it's not because the microwave oven heated the plate. It's because the food's hot. It's the food and the food. That's why you can usually pick it up with the handles. You can cook food on a paper plate. That's right. It doesn't burst into flames. Doesn't burst into flames. This is crazy. What? You didn't show.