the microwave freezer

Inspired by others taking credit for vague inventions, I would like to go on record with a vague invention of my own that I suspect will someday be very valuable. First, in case it’s not already obvious, let me be clear that I have no idea what I’m talking about.

The idea is much like noise-cancelling headphones, but rather than sound waves cancelling sound waves, you use various types of radiation to cancel out other radiation. For example, you could create a reverse-microware that would measure the vibration of the molecules in the food, and create an inverse microwave pattern that would cancel the vibration, therefore freezing the product. Perhaps there could be other applications in protecting ourselves from the gigawatts of energy we pump into ourselves every day.

Again – absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. If you know why this might be a stupid idea, I’d rather not hear from you. I’m only soliciting positive feedback.

 

27 thoughts on “the microwave freezer

  1. Although not officially, I am credited with inventing eye-glasses, as well as the phrase, “Shut up, four-eyes.”

    About your invention idea: I don’t know how many times I have had the necessity to freeze something in 30 seconds. I say I don’t know, because I honestly don’t know. It could have been one time, but maybe not.

  2. On one hand, I know I started calling Keiths IPA “vitamin K” long before anyone else around 1986. About the same time I realized that black holes were nothing but the result of particles reaching full light speed – the evidence of each phenomena being similar. The reasons for in the increase in particle speed are still not clear but, having already coined vitimin K, you can’t expect me to figure out everything.

    In the first case, the societal shift is clear as by the early 1990’s the big fat hairy blond guy behind the bar at the Seahorse was calling it vitimin K, too. Steven Hawkings, on the other hand, has not picked up on my idea with such vigor, a fact which I put down solely to professional jealousy.

  3. I think this is a fabulous idea. Unlike everyone I know, I have never owned a microwave. But if it could also be made to freeze things, I would buy one in a snap. You could cook something, then flip the switch and freeze it and put it in the freezer for when you were actually hungry. You could make a whole week’s worth of tasty food in just a few minutes and then not have to think about food again except when you thought, “oh boy, when I get home, I am going to have some of that tasty microwave lasagna that I cooked/froze on the weekend”. I think tihs invention could make you an eccentric millionaire in no time (at which point you wouldn’t even have to push the buttons for cook/freeze. You could hire someone!)

  4. This morning I accidentally invented a method for creating corn fourty times the size it averages currently. I’m not sure who to tell, but I know this could definitely feed some third-world countries for years.

    If only I had been lucky enough to invent giant corn picks as well, so that we might enjoy my invention without getting butter all over our shirts. But alas, my roommate shouted out, “Giant picks!” before I could stop picturing how big a single kernel from my mega-corn will be.

    People might think God is losing his teeth.

  5. I forgot to mention: I also decided “forty” will no longer be spelled as such. It will always be spelled “fourty” from now on, so as to finally stop questions like, “Where did the U go?” and, “Do we still spell the singular with the U?”

  6. “You could cook something, then flip the switch and freeze it and put it in the freezer for when you were actually hungry.”

    Or you could cook something and put it the freezer for when you were actually hungry.

    Most storage devices for frozen things also work fairly well as freezers-of-things in their own right, sort of eliminating the need for the extra appliance.

    It would be handy if you wanted a banana popsicle right away. I mean now, fella. Move.

  7. Speaking as a pastry chef I know when I freeze fruit you have to do it in a 2 stage process, on sheet pans and then into bags so they all don’t stick togther, a freezerwave (copyright)would make that into a one stage affair. Also how many times has your roommate used up all the ice cubes right before you have a party and then someone has to go out and get ice. How fast you you just whip some up in the freezerwave(c)? Fast.

  8. i invented this contraption while trying to stay awake during science class as a sixth grader. as the name implies, i had no idea how it would work. i just knew what it would do: make stuff cold fast. and i knew what it would be called: the macrowave.

  9. for an art project we had to invent something… well not actually make it but just draw a sort of outline of what it could be. i thought i had invented the “fast o freeze” a microwave that instead freezes food. but then i found this website and realized that i wasn’t the first to come up with the idea.
    but i do think that there is a great need for the fast o freeze. i mean geez why doesn’t anyone else see it as a household necessity?

  10. The patent for this application of microwaves is registered and owned by IONICS, a US Water Treatment Company.

  11. Graeme, how do you know that IONICS has the patent for this application of a mircowave? What do they call the idea? Have they started development on it? Cos i want one!

  12. The same idea occurred to me as a random thought about a week ago, which has prompted to Google to this site. I’m confident however that someone smarter and more equiped and/or funded to explore such an invention has:

    1. Already figured out either how to do it and protected the idea.
    or
    2. Determined it is too complex or expensive to develop given the resources available.

  13. Well i seem to remember seeing this on the tv a few years ago… sort of like one of those dreams that you thought you had, or a déja vu perhapse. The only realism is that thiis must have been some april fools ordeal, defying physical laws being one of the holy-day’s best used weapons.

    but seriously…. how about a device which CAN freeze, not by cancelling the energy waves of the water molecules, but ‘bashing’ them off at high velocity (the electrons into lower shells). the type of enclosure would have to be close to something of that like dark matter as the thing you are cooling will get warm on the surface as the heat rises through it. and… and…..

    meh… who am i kidding… i’m not a physicist, just and engineer.

    Dandy

  14. Dandy,

    At room temperature the electrons are in their ground state, you have to get pretty hot before electrons jump to higher orbits. And the idea of cancelling the vibrational energy of molecules by bombarding them with electromagnetic radiation (photons) would not work because that would only excite the system further. That is why microwaves came in first, it is easy to excite something, not so much to cool it down… You would have to extract energy, by sucking photons out of the vibrating water molecules, which is inherently impossible. I’m an engineer too though, not extremely familiar with quantum physics. Mebbe there is some quantum mechanic process by which you could excite the molecules to a virtual quantum state from which they would have to “come down” by emitting the same photon or a more energetic photon, therefore reducing the vibrational frequency of the molecule, probably impossible, specially since molecules are not harmonic oscillators but have different energy spacings as they are excited, which would make it extremely hard to determine the exact energy of the photon to be bombarded to reach a virtual quantum level. Dunno, something to think about…

  15. haven’t you guys ever seen Haggard?! With the CKY boys in it? Someone in that movie invents a microwave freezer and it’s rad. Go see it NOW

  16. while moving, my dog chewed thru the the wire on my microwave and when I put it back toghther I must have crossed the wires or something. after I pugged it into the wall it froze stuff really fast after that. we use it in the summer to flash freeze beer and make big blocks of ice to sit on rather than run the air conditioner. we call it the macro-wave. great invention. trying to sell it, but the corporate world doesn’t believe me or something.

  17. I saw a reversable microwave on tv….Im not joking, with in two minutes it froze orange juice to make ice lollies, it is not only a dream invention but a reality, this was in the early 90’s on either ‘tommorows world’ or a kids tv programme called ‘it’ll never work’ anyone rember seing it??

  18. Tim, i saw the exact same thing, it was on tomorrows world (back in the good old days (before that pratt peter snow) and with that lovely fiona), they put it in a white ice-cube ontainer in somebody’s kitchen with yellow popsicle stick thingys on top, and in one min – she ate them!

    What is this madness we saw… were we being had!?!

    My mission in life now stands at finding out whether this was a scam or not

    Dan

  19. I’ve been pondering this for some years.
    I’m no engineer or physicist but couldn’t something be done on a similar principal as removing magnetism from magnets?

    IE placing the the magnet (ie popsicle) in a gradually reducing alternating current field – or suitably reducing but alternating microwave field in this case?

  20. Firstly, oliver… microwaves are not awful, they are just energy, like sitting by an open fire. Ignorance is awful…don’t be scaremongered by other peoples’ opinions if they’re not your own.

    Trevor… i like i like. High magnetic fields (above 5 Tesla or so) create a small radio signl off of atoms of water molecules (thus the good ol’ MRI scanners).
    What if this magnetism was higher (not quite supernova style but high), would this energy being released from the atoms result in the atoms loosing energy.
    If you think about it, magnetism isn’t transferring energy into the atoms, so in a high field with the energy being emitted from the atom, surely some NET energy is being lost – thus resulting in a ‘colder’ liquid.

    unfortnatly my field is in telecommunications and i am a secondary school physics teacher – which doesn’t leave for too much expertise in the area of particle physics… nor have i ever had the misfortune of needing an MRI scan… has anyone ever got frost bite from one of these :p

    (ah and it was phillipa forrester- the true gem of the tomorrows world!)

    Dan

  21. In response to Olivia, here is an extract from a wikipedia article on microwave ovens to back up her statement:

    ‘Some people claim that there exist more subtle dangers than the ones listed above associated with cooking in a microwave oven. These are:

    that microwave cooking causes more loss of nutrients than conventional cooking, and that microwave radiation leads to chemical reactions in the food that are different from those occurring during conventional heating and which can cause cancer or other ill effects if consumed, particularly due to the formation of a group of suspected carcinogens called d-nitrosodienthanolamines.

    After World War II, the Soviet Union’s Institute of Radio Technology investigated German microwave cooking technology and observed several key harmful effects of microwaves, prompting the country to ban the use of microwaves in 1976.

    Food scientist Dr Hans Ulrich Hertel and Bernard Blanc of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology teamed up in 1989 to research the effects of eating microwaved food in humans by comparing blood samples. They compared the blood of the subjects before and after eating food that had been microwaved versus food that had been cooked conventionally. Their research concluded that the food itself and the blood of the subjects suffered serious irregularities.’

    Full article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven

    -Vince

  22. Entirely possible.I’ve been theorizing such principles for many years.conceptualize the tuning fork action of current microwaves aligning water molecules, then think that you can provide an abscence of that energy after the propagating wave developed.make all molecules line up then tap them of the standing wave.phase variance is quite plausible.

  23. Funnily enough, this is theoretically possible. As many of you mentioned, microwaves are just electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency. Lasers also emit electromagnetic radiation, and physicists have been using lasers to cool things for a while now (indeed, that’s what the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics went for: http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1997/ !). Physicists generally use this for small bits of matter, often individual atoms, but there’s no reason I can think of why it couldn’t be scaled.

    If you want to have a look at how laser cooling works and ‘expand your mind’, check out the Wikipedia article on Laser Cooling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling

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