Reporting back on the marshmallows...

Yesterday I bought a 175g bag of Haribo pink and 
white marshmallows, price 99p, and put them on my 
desk (musty memories of school science 
experiments are nagging that I ought to be using 
a passive sentence construction). That was my 
first mistake, because by this morning I'd eaten 
about six and felt ill. I also discovered that I 
didn't have nearly enough to cover my A4 sheet of 
stiff cardboard so I spaced them apart at 50mm square centres.

Not wishing to cheat, I made no effort to 
calculate the likely distance between hot-spots beforehand.

I removed the turntable from my microwave oven 
and covered the rotating 'hub' with an 
upside-down dinner plate. I balanced my 
marshmallow-laden cardboard on the bottom of the 
plate, closed the door and switched on for 45 
seconds, hoping it was OK to assume that pink and 
white marshmallows would respond fairly similarly.

On inspecting the results, it was immediately 
apparent that I should have splashed out another 
99p and packed the marshmallows together closely. 
Some were melted and some were totally 
unaffected, but no pattern was obvious because I'd spaced them too far apart.

The label on the back of my microwave oven 
indicates a frequency of 2,450 MHz.  300 million 
metres per second divided by 2,450 million 
'wavelengths per second' = 0.12 metres. So the 
half-wavelength intervals between my marshmallow 
hot-spots ought to have been about 60mm, or two 
marshmallow-diameters. Looking again at the 
results armed with such knowledge, I could of 
course see this was EXACTLY what had happened...

Conclusions.

1. To do this properly you need two 175g bags of Haribo marshmallows (£1.98).

2. If you are concerned about mixing pink and 
white ones, you need 4 bags (£3.96).

3. None of the apparatus should be eaten until the end of the experiment.


[log in to unmask] * http://www.interactives.co.uk
*
Give people facts and you feed their minds for an hour.
Awaken curiosity and they feed their own minds for a lifetime.
*
Ian Russell 

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