 Have you ever wondered how a microwave cooks your food? Well you've probably heard the expression, I'm going to nuke my pizza. Well that's not exactly correct because when you use the word nuke it's referring to something nuclear. Two examples, nuclear fusion is how an atomic bomb works and nuclear fusion is how the sun works. And the microwave actually uses electromagnetic radiation or plainly put radio waves. And these are generated by the magnetron tube and it sits behind here. And when you start to microwave up you might hear the low humming noise so that's the thing that emits the electromagnetic radiation or again radio waves. They come out here and they come out at a frequency of 2.45 billion times a second. In other words they're oscillating and going back and forth changing direction 2.45 billion times a second. You'll see in a minute why that's important. Because what happens is they come out, a microwave will pass through plastic, it will pass through glass but it will actually be absorbed by liquid such as water, milk or any other liquid. And what happens is the molecules in the liquid actually have polarization north and south poles and as the microwaves are going back and forth it's causing the molecules in the food to also go back and forth. And this excites the molecules and as such they produce heat and that's where the heat from the microwave comes from. Now as I mentioned the microwaves come out the top here and when you cook something we're going to use a demonstration here I'm going to heat up a glass of water and for illustration purposes I have a knee on light it's actually three knee on lights and you see how the microwave not only works but why it's important that we have to rotate the food as it's being cooked. So I'm going to set that up on top of my glass of water there we're going to program the microwave for 60 seconds and as you watch you see sometimes it's three sometimes it's two sometimes it's one knee on light and the reason it's being is the microwaves come out they bounce around inside the cavity and as such as they pass through the food while they heat the food they don't heat the food evenly because the microwaves don't pass through the food all at once. Now as you rotate the food round and round as it's illustrated by our lights here the food is cooked right here and as you watch when the light goes off here there's actually no microwaves passing through the lights and they don't come on and the same with the food as your food goes there's no microwave energy heating up the food so as you rotate it the part that wasn't heated before becomes heated so eventually the whole plate of food or whatever it is you're cooking becomes warm now if you've ever taken out a steak or a hamburger or something neat and right away you'll notice that some spots are hot and some are cold and that's why because the microwave isn't heating evenly so it's best when you take your food out of the microwave leave it sit for a minute or two that way the heat will distribute and it'll actually move from the areas of hot to cold and warm them up and that's how today's microwaves work