How Not To Cook Popcorn With Your Mobile Phone…

Yes, yes, yes, I know it’s a bit late seeing as since we did it it’s been in every newspaper and on other radio shows but here’s the evidence anyway…

After seeing this here we tried cooking popcorn live on air last Tuesday with our phones. Well, what do you think happened….? 🙁

8 thoughts on “How Not To Cook Popcorn With Your Mobile Phone…

  1. I was thinking about this! In the video, not only are there 4 phones around the kernels but there are 4 other phones there in their hands. Maybe you need 8 phones. Maybe those who were ringing the phones were too far away?
    Unlikely, but it’s a slight possibility!

  2. Jesus Rick you’re playing with fire. Didn’t you see The Incredible Hulk last week? You shouldn’t be MEDDLING with SCIENCE!

  3. In case you guys don’t realize it, even a thousand mobile phones could not pop a single kernel, unless you took them apart and built a maser out of them.

    The peak power a mobile phone produces is two watts. That power is emitted in a sphere. The popcorn intersects a tiny point of that sphere, representing the teensy amount of that two watts hitting it.

    A microwave oven is hundreds of watts, all trapped inside a faraday cage around the food. It is also a higher frequency, so that the dielectric effect (which heats water and organic molecules) is greater.

    Oh, and the kernels have a ridiculous surface area/mass ratio. They can disperse heat faster than any number of phones could produce it.

    And, as a related point, microwaves are non-ionizing wave radiation, not particle radiation like the kind that killed Madame Curie. It isn’t really “radiation” in the geiger-counter sense at all. It doesn’t break up organic molecules, causing sunburn, cellular decay, and cancer like ionizing/particle radiation.

    Ever.

  4. Don’t be silly!!!!!!

    When cooking popcorn in a microwave oven, energy excites the water inside popcorn kernels until it turns into highly pressurised gas, causing the kernels to pop. If mobile phones emitted that much energy, the water in the fingers of people holding them would heat up and “It would burn like crazy,” So, what’s really causing the kernels to ricochet off the table in the YouTube clip? Tricky video editing or even a heating element beneath the table, NO those idiots have dismantled a microwave oven.

    If you want to cook your brains aswell as popcorn for the sake of a YouTube video, then dismantle a microwave oven, expose the microwave tube, extend the 3000V wires so that the microwave tube can be placed under a table as shown in the clip. Then simply pretend that your mobile has cooked the popcorn. Make sure you record it and place your video on you tube so that people like me think that you can cook popcorn with a mobile phone.

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