Why are microwaves better at cooking food than other forms of electromagnetic radiation?

Answer 1

Infrared radiation cannot pass very far into your food so can only really cook the outside, (that is why we use it for cooking toast for example) but microwaves are much more penetrating. Microwaves also cook in a different way, they make the water molecules in your food vibrate and so heat them and your food up.

Answer 2

Friendly answer: "Microwave ovens" work by activating water molecules; the energy waves are converted by the water molecules into motion (another type of energy); the faster motion activates the surrounding non-water molecules, and this activation continues in a chain reaction. You might have noticed that microwaved foods don't retain heat as long as foods cooked on a stove or in a conventional oven; this is because a microwave oven doesn't actually heat the target, it only makes the water molecules vibrate, and after a while the energy dissipates and the food rapidly cools (whereas when foods are heated by heat-transfer methods, all the particles in the food experience a fairly uniform increase in temperature). Techy answer: The wavelengths of the energy waves encountered in microwave ovens are proportionally relevant to the size of a water molecule, which permits these waves to activate the water molecules in the target (as this is the base theory on which microwave ovens operate).

Answer 3

Used for what, exactly? Visible light and microwaves have different properties; light is useful for some things, microwaves for others, and other frequency ranges (of electromagnetic waves) yet for others.

Answer 4

For cooking:

-- The molecules of water and fat resonate at microwave frequencies, but do not resonate
at light frequencies. The meatloaf would absorb very little energy from light.

-- We pump microwaves into the cooking chamber at levels of 1,000 to 1,500 watts,
making it possible to boil a cup of water in two or three minutes. It's not easy to
generate 1,000 to 1,500 watts of light. The ways we have of doing that still come
with great amounts of heat ... inconvenient in a kitchen appliance.

-- In order to set up the proper standing-wave pattern inside the MW oven, the walls
of the cooking chamber need to be separated by exactly a whole number of wavelengths.
It's quite a bit easier to manufacture them accurately to a multiple of 12 centimeters than
to a multiple of 0.000075 centimeter (red light).


For communication:

-- Rain, snow, sleet, fog, dust, and smoke in the air have a much greater effect on light than on
microwaves. For communication, the effects are all bad.

-- At the present state of technology, we are very good at putting information on a beam of
microwaves, but not so good at putting information on a beam of light.

Answer 5

because they use radiation power to power and then heat the objects inside of it