Microwave ovens cook things by shooting radio waves at food, right? So if I put something small in the microwave, and it doesn’t catch many… microwaves, are the other microwaves wasted, or do they play some other role?
In: Physics
Microwaves bounce around the interior very quickly so your item has a lot of opportunities to “catch” those waves. But some proportion of them are instead going to be absorbed by things like the walls of the microwave or the magnetron itself. Heating up the magnetron is usually considered to be a waste so those waves are not useful.
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