Loading Time - Microwaves

[Graham]

Truth! Which is why we stood so far back.

I just keep mentioning the non-ionizing part so that people don't go "OMG CANCER!!"

[AlexanderDitto]

Although a gas will become ionised when heated, ionisation is not required for electrons to be excited into higher energy states and then decay, emitting light.

That was exactly my point. It doesn't really make any sense to explain that electrons can be excited and then fall back down to a lower energy state emitting photos without ever mentioning quantum states. The electron goes up to a line, and then falls back down the lower line? The Bohr model is at least useful for conceptualizing energy states, even though it gets orbitals wrong. From there it doesn't seem a stretch to describe the orbitals as oddly-shaped probability distributions instead of orbits.

It's not like I suggested the Rutherford model. High school teachers spend far too much time teaching very wrong atomic models.

...but you can get very serious RF burns from microwave radiation quite easily if you are unsafe.

Which is precisely what he meant by

...the most they're going to do to a person is cook them, and that's only if we stood there and let it happen.

Burns are what happen when you cook people. D:

Also:

Microphones are incredibly sensitive to waves, as you heard, but the camera equipment shouldn't have been hurt at all, certainly not at that distance.

The understatement of the century! Consider how much noise cell phone signals or power lines can cause when near microwaves. And we get dosed with plenty of those all the time.

[Darkobra]

I thoroughly enjoyed this one! Cam's quite the dark horse!

[ArchieO]

Awesome explanation Cam, only thing I can see you missed was the two lone pairs on the water molecule