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Comment by moogleii | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with microwave technology at all. A sad face is warranted.

Reverse microwaves? The author of the post must be completely, 100% scientifically illiterate.

I think she meant reverse microwave oven. As in, rather than heating fast, it cools fast.

Yeah, I think it's just a pragmatic layman's term for a good headline. I've complained over the years to my wife I'd like a "reverse microwave" for exactly this use, so it certainly clicked with me.

But anyone who usually understands "microwave" as electromagnetic energy will find this title extremely confusing.

I think most people on HN are familiar with both microwaves and microwave ovens. It's not really hard to see which one the author was going for.

That is like calling ice a reverse fire. If the technology doesn't have anything to do with microwaves, I don't see how the "reverse microwave" adds anything but confusion. It's not as though "chills beer in 45 seconds" is so vague as to require a strained microwave analogy.

I loved this comment, why is it being downvoted?

The headline writer is simply speaking figuratively, for maximum effect in constrained space. This is easily understood by a general audience, but sometimes misunderstood by the extra-literal/extra-critical mindset often seen in HN threads.

In the headline, 'Microwave' stands synecdochally for 'microwave oven' and then also for the more-general category 'fast-heating appliance'.

When there are multiple ways to interpret something, assume the interpretation that credits the writer/speaker with some sense, not an interpretation that is most-literal or most-amenable as the setup for an insult.

I voted you up for truth.

But... don't discount the profound disappointment that a headline like that generates in those of us who do know how a microwave works. We were teased with the idea of learning something we thought would alter our understanding of the universe -- some sort of microwave version of the peltier effect[1] -- only to find out it was something as pedestrian as poetic license.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect

Those who know physics would hopefully know that a cooling microwave would be a blatant violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

In soviet russia...

SCNR

Oddly enough, your response is basically the same sort of overly-narrow literalism that gojomo was complaining about, just from the other direction.

No, it's not.

"reverse microwave" is correct in a sense, because as gojomo pointed out, the author meant it as a way to convey the concept of "rapid-heating appliance".

"You can't do x because of thermodynamics" actually was incorrect, and didn't take into account multiple specific instances which show that closed systems can create such results.

No it wouldn't - as long as the device, target and environment heat up as a whole. For ex, laser cooling where a laser reflects off a surface with more energy than it started with.

I must admit... Before I read the article, I spend a moment trying to figure out how they got microwaves out of the the spin energy of water molecules. Thankfully, that doesn't happen.

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