Suppose I disable every safety mechanism in my microwave oven, so that it still works, but there is no door. It’s running and I stick my hand in there for a few seconds. What happens? Would I even feel anything?
Suppose my hands were wet (pretend I’d just washed them and hand’t dried them yet). Would I feel anything then?
I think your hands would feel hot and painful (depending on how long they’re being heated, of course) whether or not you put water on them (your hands are mostly water already). Though, since your heat sensing nerves are mostly on the skin and not buried in the muscle and bones, you might not realize how much damage the microwaves were actually doing.
A few seconds wouldn’t do much. It’s only microwaves and not radioactivity from a nuclear meltdown.
Your hand would feel warm, eventually becoming painfully hot. A layer of water on the surface of your hands wouldn’t change much – perhaps there’d be slightly more surface heating, and you’d feel your skin burning before the rest of your hand was cooked.
Basically your hand would cook like any other piece of meat you’ve ever stuck in the microwave.
The Microwaves would probably kill you faster…
A couple seconds of the power a microwave puts out will not cook your hand off, let alone kill you.
Microwave “radiation” isn’t really radiation in the way that most people use the word “radiation”. Microwave radiation is electromagnetic radiation in the microwave radio frequency band (specifically, about 2.54 GHz). In other words, it’s radio waves. Radio waves, like visible light (another type of electromagnetic radiation) are non-ionizing, meaning that they are too low in frequency to strip the electrons off of atoms and create ions. Higher frequency electromagnetic radiation (ultraviolet light, x-rays, gamma rays, etc) is ionizing, and ionizing radiation is well known to cause cell damage and cancer and all that fun stuff. Ionizing radiation from the sun is what causes things to fade when left outside. (ETA) Ionizing radiation is usually what people are really thinking of when they use the term “radiation” these days.
Non-ionizing radiation still causes heat, though. That’s how your microwave oven works, and that’s how you can fry ants with a magnifying glass and sunlight. Just like the magnifying glass example, if you get enough electromagnetic radiation focused in one place, it’s going to get hot and burn stuff. That’s how the microwave cooks your food.
If you put your hands in there, it’s going to cook your hands. A few seconds is probably long enough for you to give yourself a fairly nasty RF (radio frequency) burn. RF burns tend to be exceptionally painful because the RF energy tends to penetrate deep into your tissues, so not only do you burn your skin but you burn the fat and muscle underneath it, unlike a conventional burn from touching a hot stove or something like that where the damage starts at the skin and then works its way in. With a stove, you feel pain when the skin gets burned and you can often pull your hand away before the burn gets too deep. With a microwave, the deep parts burn just as quickly as the skin, within limits of course. Microwaves don’t penetrate too far into meat, as anyone who has ever tried to microwave a big thick piece of meat can tell you (if it’s more than about an inch thick it stays cool in the middle).
At lower power levels, microwave radio waves feel like warm sunlight, and as far as we currently understand, are just as safe.
PurelyFOAF here, but a guy I was dating supposedly had a friend who had a defective microwave, and she reached in to stir something, it was not shut off correctly and it did enough nerve damage to paralyze her hand and she supposedly got a very large settlement.
No idea if this is true or not, but it is the story he gave me as to why he refused to have a microwave oven, and refused to come into the kitchen if mine was running. :rolleyes
1000W of microwaves will cause burns in a matter of seconds - it would take an enormous dose of nuclear radiation to cause the same amount of damage.
Has anyone ever done an experiment as described in the OP?
What would happen to anyone in a normal 10x10 room running a standard microwave oven with the door off for say 10 minutes?
This assumes all 1000 watts of microwave emitted by the magnetron are absorbed by the victim’s hand. That might be the case inside a sealed microwave oven enclosure (where the waves bounce around until they are absorbed by teh target), but the OP’s scenario specified no door on the oven. Most of the 1000 watts are going to spray out of the door opening. Some will hit the arm, torso and head of the victim, causing some heating. But I expect the majority of those 1000 watts of microwave energy will be dispersed into the rest of the kitchen.
And since the microwaves that are incident upon the victim are absorbed into the depth of flesh (as opposed to visible or infrared light, which is absorbed at the skin’s surface), the rate-of-rise of temperature (measured in degrees per second) will be pretty slow.
Not with a microwave and not as an experiment but broadcast transmitters put out a lot of radio waves, and because of harmonics, some higher frequency emissions as well. I knew an engineer who was repairing an unshielded coil, touched it* and had blistered his hand before he could even pull it away.
*Disclaimer: yes he actually made physical contact with it, not the scenario in the OP.
With the door completely removed, most of the waves would quickly dissipate about the room. The door is an integral part of the mixing action that centers the waves on the floor of the device. You might have the equivalent of a 50 watt microwave on your hand. However, there would be hot spots in the oven. You could easily pick a spot where the stream of waves came right out into your hand. The pain and damage would be intense.
I thought non-ionizing UV causes fading. I’d be worried if that much ionizing radiation reached ground level.
Homer Simpson once visited an experimental kitchen with a walk-in microwave.
My microwave didn’t turn off after I opened the door today. I reached in and took out the plate, then realized it was still on - it was still buzzing and rotating so I slammed the door. I didn’t feel anything. I was probably exposed for less than 3 seconds. The only effect I’ve noticed after a few hours later is that I might have burned my thumb slightly. It is a little red, swollen and sore next to the nail.
Once on *Mythbusters *Jamie took the emitters, the magnetrons, from like five microwave ovens and mounted them all into one ‘super-microwave’. Big disappointment as it didn’t heat or cook anything the slightest bit faster…
I saw that episode. I would like to build something similar for my own use. I wonder what the problem was with Jamie’s design. Maybe all the magnetrons would need to be in phase with one another. I’m not sure how one would accomplish this though.