How to film the inside of a microwave (2 ways)

I'm going to show you two ways to film inside a microwave and along the way I'm going to show you the easiest way to make a plasma in a microwave none of this cutting a grape in half or lighting a match right now they're guaranteed plasma in a microwave every time it all started with a whatsapp conversation that I had with my wife Leanne when she was out for the evening and I was in the house on my own at 10:33 I sent this message I think I figured out how to film inside a microwave I'm going to have a play she replied almost immediately saying exciting try not to break the microwave smiley face you might assume that that message is passive-aggressive if you don't know Leanne but it's not she really supports my two minutes later at 10:35 I sent this message two minutes it was it was very sudden I thought I'd figured out all the things that could go wrong but it turns out there was some unknown unknowns anyway she replied saying fixable question mark it's a good question isn't it we'll get back to that in a minute but the the reason I wanted to film inside a microwave and you'll know this if you've seen previous videos of mine is that there are fun experiments that you can do that involve putting a thing in a microwave the problem is it's hard to see the results of that experiment as it's happening because of the structure of a microwave door it's a microp doors made of several layers at least two layers of glass that give you glare and reflection but most annoyingly you've got this layer of metal mesh which although it's annoying is actually the most important part of the door from a safety point of view because that's the thing that stops microwave radiation getting out of the oven so my thinking was if microwave radiation can't get through a metal mesh maybe I can put a camera in the microwave if I surround it with a metal mesh and you probably know this you're not supposed to put metal in a microwave I mean like I questioned that given that the inside of a microwave is made of metal so as a test I just got I got a sheet of metal mesh just a little square and I made it flush against the inside of the microwave which is made of metal I actually put it flush against the door in fact which is which is glass not metal there's maybe way I went wrong because one corner of the the metal mesh got incredibly hot incredibly quickly and literally in two seconds I opened the door a glowing red heart and it melted the glass there was a little blob of molten glass so my plan was to wait for it to cool down and just kind of pick it off because I didn't want anyone to know well I done it turns out that the glass on the inside of a microwave is toughened and one of the side-effects of toughening glass is that if you introduce even a small crack it will spread very quickly to the rest of the glass which is what happened when I tried to pick at it so I mean dance is that question at least but it got me thinking like why is it that microwave radiation can't get through those little holes in the metal mesh and it's actually a quirk of wave dynamics so microwaves are electromagnetic waves and waves cannot pass through a hole if the hole is substantially smaller than the wavelength of the wave so microwaves have a wavelength of about 12 centimeters the ones in a microwave oven do at least and the holes in the metal mesh of a microwave door are about one or two millimeters in size why waves can't get through small holes is kind of tricky I don't think there's an intuitive way to explain it but it falls out of the mathematics one of the results is that if you take the ratio of the wavelength of the wave to the size of the hole and then raise that to the fourth power that tells you how much the power drops off the wavelength of microwaves is but about 10 centimeters the holes in a microwave grill in the door about 1 millimeter so that's a factor of a hundred difference raise that to the fourth power you've got 8 zeros so the amount of radiation outside of microwave is 100 millionth of what it would be if the holes were about 10 centimeters across how does that help us to film inside of microwave well reducing the power of radiation by a factor of a hundred million is clearly Oh a kill we could make the holes bigger quick safety warning modifying a microwave oven can make it dangerous this is not for children it's for adults only and if you're planning to modify a microwave oven be aware that you should assess the risks for yourself this video does not constitute a risk assessment suppose the holes were a centimeter in size well that's a difference of a factor of 10 compared to a wavelength of 10 centimeters so 10 to the power 4 is 10,000 so if the holes were 1 centimeter in size the microwave radiation would attenuate by a factor of 10,000 compared to a hole that's 10 centimeters wide for me that's fine and also it's big enough to put a camera phone in front of if you subscribe to Kody's lab you'll have seen a method similar to this one though he comes in from the side that video actually isn't available anymore it's a long story as to why but the short story is Cody's lab is an amazing Channel and you should check it out I actually skipped a step which is the removal of the layer of glass from the outside and the inside glass produces glare but actually something else interesting that I learnt when I was looking at the safety of all this stuff is that although the mesh stops microwaves propagating out of the microwave oven they actually attenuate over a short distance so right next to the mesh there is some microwave radiation but it drops off exponentially I think that's why you have that layer of glass on the outside of the microwave it actually creates a gap between you and the mesh so as a note of caution don't put any of your body parts up against the mesh when you're doing this experiment especially don't put your eyeball up against the hole it can cause cataracts anyway that's how I was able to film expanding so sparkling CDs and melting glass but it wasn't gonna work for 2 other videos that I wanted to make to explain the second method for a filling inside of microwave think about how a pinhole camera works you light a scene that you want to take a picture of and light bounces off objects in the scene into the camera but think about the direction that the light has to go in to get into the camera so light that's coming off the subjects foot can travel in only one direction to get into the camera which is this direction like bouncing off the subjects head there's only one direction that it can travel in to get into the camera which is this direction so you get this flipped image inside the camera here's one that I made and his derelict ship outside my studio and here is through the pinhole camera there's always a compromise with a pinhole camera which is that the hole is really small so there's not much light coming into your camera the image is really dark so what you do is you you make the hole bigger but the problem making the hole bigger is now light coming from your scene has a range of directions that it can travel in to get into the camera and so the image is blurred what's the solution the solution is to use a lens if you stick a lens in that larger hole in the pinhole camera then it will focus the light it's no longer a pinhole camera because you put it lens in probably the lens is it focuses objects at a specific distance anything in front of that will be out of focus anything behind it will be out of focus and if you know a little bit about cameras you'll be familiar with this compromise like if you want everything in your seam to be roughly in focus then what you want to do is on your camera you want to close up the aperture make it smaller so your camera is more like a pinhole camera I can actually demonstrate it with this video at the moment my aperture is wide open so I've got what's called a narrow depth of field which means that there's only a kind of short range of distances that are in focus which is around my face anything in front of it is blurry anything behind it is below like the back war but I can control it from my phone so like if I close up the aperture less light is getting in so it's getting dark I'm going to compensate for that with shutter speed and so look the scenes darker but the back wall is now more in focus and my this morning focus as well tech we use this to our advantage to film inside a microwave well if you've got a DSLR with a really nice lens like a prime lens then you've probably got a really low f-stop you can really open up the aperture mine goes down to 1.4 which is definitely enough for thumbing inside of microwave and then you focus your lens on the the subject inside the microwave and the grill will be completely out of focus and they'll just be acting almost like a an ND filter just like just be darkening the image which you can then compensate for in in other ways this method is superior to the camera phone method in a few ways if you're filming something that produces its own source of light like why a wolf for example then you probably want manual control over things like shutter speed ISO f-stop things like that which is often not possible with a smartphone it's just a better picture as well you know a DSLR with a nice lens is a better image even through a mesh than a camera phone the other thing is you know you've drilled one hole in your microwave that's the one spot that you can film that's the one camera angle that you have whereas with the external narrow depth of field method you can move the camera wherever you want which leads me onto the main event how to make a plasma in a microwave guaranteed so some methods involve cutting a grape in half and you have to leave a bit of skin in it for me that works like 1 in 10 times it's quite unreliable maybe I just not doing it very well but anyway I've found that if you buy carbon fiber tissue and you tear off a little bit scrunch it up a little bit stick it in the microwave you'll always get a plasma and all you have to do is then stick a Pyrex Bowl over the top and you can catch [Music] [Music] I've been talking to the creator of the Nile red YouTube channel about filming in a microwave because he's gonna do that for an upcoming video I recommend you hop over there and subscribe in advance because he makes great videos this video is made possible by my patrons on patreon and brilliant org brilliant org is a really fun puzzle website for nerds like you and me they have the best kinds of puzzle by which I mean puzzles that make you go yeah the best thing is they make you feel smart too because you're actually going smarter as you do the puzzles they're curated with that idea in mind and it really shows I've been working with brilliant for a while now and they're good people who've made something really special so I want you to check it out give it a try for free today by clicking on the link in the description and as a bonus the first 76 people to use that link will get 20% off annual premium membership should they choose to upgrade I hope you enjoyed this video if you did don't forget to hit subscribe and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Steve Mould

Views: 526,518

Keywords: explained, understand, howto, radiation, oven, camera, f stop, dslr, lens, aperture

Id: 8bXhsUs-ohw

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018