[I sent this once and it bounced with a "Connection refused" from
ultra5.eskimo.com. I'm resending it...]
Jones Beene wrote:
Some rather profound quandaries are often presented by experiments in
high school science fairs ... and often mainstream physics can only
guess at the answers:
hhttp://www.execonn.com/sf/
Interesting.
There are some very large differences between boiling on the stove and
boiling in a microwave oven.
On a stove the heat is from the bottom, the water is heated more or less
evenly (due to convection), and it typically all comes to boiling,
throughout the cup. In consequence, as one example, one would expect
dissolved air to be driven out of stovetop-boiled water very
effectively. Chlorine would also most likely be driven out quite well.
Microwave-boiled water is _typically_ boiled by adding heat on the sides
and top. Penetration of the microwaves into the water is typically not
deep -- perhaps half an inch at best (water's pretty opaque to
microwaves). Due to convection, the result is _typically_ that just the
top "skin" of the water really boils. The bulk of the cup doesn't get
all that hot by the time the top is boiling merrily. One consequence is
that a beverage heated in a microwave often seems to "cool off really
fast" -- in reality it was never heated all that much. (To avoid that
you need to stir the liquid first, so it's moving when the oven is on,
and -- I find -- you typically need to microwave it in several short
steps, stirring before each.) One further consequence would be that, if
the user of the oven isn't careful, the water which was "boiled" in the
microwave won't be heated nearly as thoroughly and so it will retain far
more dissolved air ... and, quite possibly, more chlorine.
So, you don't really need to look for subtle "chi energy" changes to
find what may be significant differences between microwave and stovetop
boiling.
(A series of impromptu experiments with saki heated in a microwave led
to some of the above conclusions, by the way. The old fashioned method
of putting the saki bottle in a pan of water and popping it onto the
range is typically far more satisfactory than the microwave!)
