if you see a dark area you can turn on a flashlight to emit light towards the area and make it not-dark.
If you see a lit area and you want it unlit, there is no anti-flashlight you can point towards it to suck the light out.
Similar kind of thing, heat can only be given, not taken. heating stuff up is easy, but for cooling the best you can do in most cases is to make it easier for the thing to give you its heat (ex by the atmosphere colder), but you can’t force it.
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This is fundamentally not true.
Light is made of electromagnetic waves. If you can control the timing of those waves precisely enough, you can add another light with the opposite phase (an inverted wave) that will cancel out the other light.
This is what happens in the famous “double slit experiment”. It’s also the same principal as noise cancelling headphones albeit with sound pressure waves instead of EM waves.
Scientists have actually cooled atoms very close to absolute zero by shining a laser at them
I said “in most cases”. I am aware that it is possible. We’re looking at a macroscopic system here though. A microwave, not a couple of atoms in a lab. good luck cooling a couple of atoms in the center of an opaque blob of food with a laser
I completely agree with your third point where you said “in most cases”.
It was your first two points trying to create an analogy with light that I was responding to
I mean like the analogy holds until quantum mechanics - which is pretty good - no need to nitpick
Neither EM wave interference nor noise cancelling headphones are quantum mechanics. It’s not nitpicking.
quantification of light as a particle and the theory of its wave particle duality yes is by definition quantum mechanics, which was proven first by the double slit expierament. Up until then 2 light sources never canceled each other out so it was assumed light is 100% quantifiable and a particle.
(quantify is actually where the word quantum comes from)
noise canceling headphones you’re good for tho, the existence of waves is a different subject
Edit: and IG if we want to talk about fundamentally untrue then, your comments also wrong cause its a pretty big thing in science that light ISNT just a wave… but of course I’m not being nitpicky right?
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It was theorized that light could be a wave way before the double slit experiment. Like, a century before. So no, it wasn’t “assumed light is 100%” quantized before that experiment.
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Anything that is a wave can be cancelled, so this idea was baked right into the wave theory of light, they just didn’t have the ability to control light precisely enough to prove it until the double slit experiment. You don’t need quantum mechanics to explain wave theory, it just happened that the double slit experiment, while proving that light behaved like a wave, also showed other characteristics that it was also behaving in a quantized fashion. The fact that light is quantized into photons has nothing to do with the fact that they cancel so you really don’t need quantum mechanics to explain it. The reason light can be cancelled is exactly the same as every other thing in physics that behaves like a wave.
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The word quantum comes from the word quantization not “quantify”. Those two words mean different things
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Light is a wave. It also happens to be a particle. So the “existence of waves” is not a different subject. It’s exactly this subject
Edit: Love the snarky edit to a post full of being confidently wrong. I’m going to go engage with others. Good day, sir/ma’am!
Quantify and quantization youre saying have different root words? their similarity in definition and to the Latin word quantus is just coincidence? (whoops nitpicky ahem ahem)
And of course it was hypothesized but never proven, double slit pushed it towards theory/fact
but also I’m not sure if you know where the line of quantum mechanics to newtonian mechanics are, cause newton definitely didn’t theorize too much about the energy of light
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In reductively simple terms heat is really easy to generate. In fact pretty much everything we do creates extra heat entirely on accident, so a device than make things hot on purpose is actually surprisingly simple. It’s much harder to get rid of. The only economical way we’ve found of managing it is by using to phase change of refrigerants to pump it out of enclosed spaces, which is how refrigerators and air conditioners currently work. Everything else would be more complex, less efficient, or both. So if such a thing is even possible it would almost certainly be much more expensive
Well, it does exist, it’s called laser cooling, but it’s only if you want to have things really cold
There is a drink chiller that chills drinks in about a minute. You could use the same idea for other things.
The Chill-O-Matic is smaller, cheaper and probably easier to clean as it doesn’t seem to have tubing.
The design of that machine in your link is a lot of overkill for something simple.
Call it Macrowave!
It’s a lot easier to generate heat from electricity than to transfer them out. Closest bet would be just blasting cold air but heat transfer will be slow so it’s still quite limited.
There’s a lot of posts here not answering the question or saying it’s impossible.
A reverse microwave is possible.
The 1997 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
It’s just very hard to do and no one has successfully cooled a large complex object with laser-based cooling.
TIL, that’s cool.
Commercial kitchens sometimes have blast chillers and blast freezers. Some of the cooking shows use them.
It’s called a freezer and it just takes a bit longer.
There is! It’s called a blast chiller and just takes a dumby amount of energy proportional the amount of energy removed from the food. It’s easier to add than subtract.
You should try to build a chamber that sprays liquid nitrogen or other cryogenic liquids at the food.
Idk, good luck.
I believe that the problem with this method is that the nitrogen will expand in contact with the hot object, and this being a chamber means that there’s risk of explosion.
They never said the chamber had to be pressure tight …
Win win in my book.
Yea, but it’d be a really cool explosion.
I’ll see myself out.
These are all word for word the same answers to the not poop for 3 days quest.
You can dump energy into something by blasting photons at it, because photons carry energy. You can’t do the reverse because you’d need to use particles with negative energy. Either that, or you’d need to suck photons out of the food, but it doesn’t work that way; things radiate photons at a specific frequency and intensity (called blackbody radiation) depending on how hot they are, and you can’t make them emit more energy except by getting them hotter.
Considering room pressure and temperature, things are not cooling at their fastest possible rate. Blackbody radiation isn’t the only way things cool down. You are forgetting conduction and convection. Liquid nitrogen can cool things down super quickly.
I’m not forgetting them: they’re just but relevant to the way I interpreted the question. I’m assuming OP wants something that works on a similar physical principle to a microwave, not just a fast way to chill things.
Ah sure, yeah, if they want it to actually use radiation, it’s not possible.
Allow me to introduce you to this
Thanks Mr Freeze!
Can I get an ELI5 of this principle? I read the Doppler cooling part but I can’t connect the dots.
It’s like slowing cars by crashing another car into them. But it’s photons instead from the exact opposite direction.
Heat energy is the amount of particle wiggling. With precisely tuned and oriented lasers you can clamp a particle in space, thus prevent it from wiggling.
No wiggling -> very cold.
A common misconception. Take the so called “light bulb” for instance. People think they emit light. They do not. They ingest darkness. They are dark suckers. They pull in all the darkness around them, but objects get in the way, and that’s why there are shadows. And when they’re full, they stop working. That’s why they have a brown spot when they stop working, they are full of dark.
Don’t fall for the light emitting conspiracy. LONG LIVE THE DARK SUCKERS!!!
It’s an old meme sir, but it checks out.
For a second I didn’t think this was a meme, and I was like “I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.”
It was a risk not adding /s especially since I tried really hard to not be too absurd as to be obvious. I will take your unease as a compliment :)
Funny note- the way we actually get things to near absolute zero, is by shooting it with lasers.
some kinds of fire extinguisher could accomplish this. bit expensive though.
