Flash freezing things is a thing.
All you need to do, is figure out a way to use electro magnetic radiation to slow down particles.
It’s just a small technical challenge.
Easy, just invert the polarity of the microwaves
i turn the microwave upside down
From these 2 sentences, I have written a 52 pages PowerPoint presentation to get funds from Wall Street.
I expect to find ~$2 bn.
See you in jail!
Calm down there Elizabeth Holmes
Hah! My ChatGPT bot did 60 slides in 90 seconds, and submitted it hours before yours. See YOU in court!
Hah! Jokes on both of you, I submitted a super generic patent for “cold microwave” YEARS ago to leech off of anyone who manages to actually invent this technology in my lifetime. See you BOTH in court (and probably also jail)!
And if you manage that, you’ll make Bill Gates and Elon Musk look like paupers.
Then you buy X and rebrand it Twatter.
I prefer Xitter.
Technically that’s already a thing. It is pretty expensive compared to a normal refrigerator though…
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Probably not. Nice choice of pic to illustrate the need, though 😄
I don’t know if it’s a stupid question or not but I have been wondering this myself for years. :)
Fridge?
There are devices that will cool a drink (can of soda or a beer) to ‘ice cold’ ( I assume something like 5°) in 60 seconds. I guess this sort of answers your question? The full answer is probably not that it is technically impossible, but that the practical use is largely limited to drinks.
What devices? That sounds dope
I had one of these when I was a kid.
It was annoying, though because you needed to fill it with ice and water. We used it very rarely. And IIRC one time we didn’t dump the water out right away and left it overnight, and it never worked again.
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
Besides freezers I don’t think there’s any technology we know that could do this on a wide range of substances. But freezers are neat - they move heat from the inside to the outside and as they are insulated they can reach temperatures 40-50 degrees (Celsius) under their surroundings
You can get “freezers” that will put part of their inside down to 250+c below their surroundings. (Helium cryocoolers)
This is cool! Where do I get one and what’s the power usage?
Semiconductor mfg firesales.
Or if you want to spend the 20+k you can buy from the manufacturer.
Oh power usage… that depends how much you need to cool down, and what setup you have. But usually they’re 3 phase and lots of amps…
The reverse microwave. I heard you need a LOT of freon.
Falcoooone
Liquid nitrogen bath, works opposite of a microwave, freezes it from outside and towards the middle.
Blast freezer. It’s about as close as we’ll get any time soon. Not an affiliate or anything, just googled and found this bugger (about microwave sized).
https://www.nisbets.co.uk/polar-countertop-blast-chiller/ck640
In beer brewing there’s a point where you want to cool your beer down as quickly as possible.
A chiller is dropped into the just cooked wort. (wort is the beer before fermentation).
It goes from steaming hot to room temperature very quickly.
It’s just a spiral pipe that you run cold water through.
Sounds like you need something like that for a potato.Push heat into something is easier than pull heat out of something
That’s not how a microwave works.
Pushing energy into a thing is easier than stopping it
It pretty much is. It bathes your food in intense radio waves that get absorbed and turned into heat.
Make something vibrate fast easier than make something vibrate slower
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Laser cooling exists, but I don’t suppose you can afford one or want your beer on 2°K
How does that work?? Genuinely curious.
Basicly photons are shot against an atom to slow it down (the slower the elements move the “colder” something gets)
It’s unintuitive, but super cool! There’s a great video by Physics Girl and Veritasium that explain it better than I ever could here.
First, the wavelength of the laser (think of it as the “color” of the laser) is chosen such that the energy of the photons is just under the energy state of the atoms that you are trying to cool.
Now, when the atom is moving toward the source of the laser, this causes the atom to “see” a higher energy. This is called Doppler shift and is a very well-known effect in anything that emits waves and is moving. In fact, you’ve experienced it before when you hear a car horn – as it moves towards you it has a higher pitch and as it moves away from you it has a lower pitch.
So, for atoms moving toward the source the see the energy rise just enough to absorb the photon and move to a higher energy state. Inevitably, the atom will want to move to a lower energy state (as all matter does) and will end up ejecting a new photon in a random direction. In order to maintain the conservation of momentum, this means that the photon will likely be ejected in a way that counteracts the direction it was previously moving, effectively slowing it down. Since heat is a measure of how fast atoms are moving, this means that atom has cooled down.
For atoms moving away from the laser source, they are unable to absorb the photons because the Doppler shift acts in the opposite direction, and they are completely unable to absorb the photons.
So as a result of all this, it is possible to slow down atoms moving in a very specific direction, without affecting the other atoms. This means you can systematically slow atoms down which means you can systematically cool things down.
Edit: Here’s a piped link to the youtube video above in case you’re privacy-conscious, however, Dianna (aka Physics Girl) has been bed-ridden with Long COVID for a while now so it would be great if you could contribute to her Patreon in lieu of the ad revenue
Thank you!! This was a fantastic explanation! Great ELI5 style, I feel I don’t even need to watch that video - even though Veritasium is amazing.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
great video by Physics Girl and Veritasium
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Great bot! But please see the edit to my post
it also helps to be cooling a single atom at a time
A lot of laser coolers were built exactly for cooling single atoms (to do scientific research)
My god where does it end with you beer snobs??
Cool question. I‘d imagine the easiest way I can at least think of is spraying it with liquid nitrogen. The challenge will be to get the nitrogen back in the bottle and keep it liquid in the meantime.
I‘m baffled our usernames only differ by one letter. My idea was, if you „sprayed“ the item from afar, it would cool the surrounding air and only ever so slightly touch that item. I don’t think this would flash freeze it. Feel free to correct me.
Who wants to cool pizza? If imagine this would mostly be used on drinks, or frozen treats like the ice cream in their picture.
Terrible use for ice cream too, actually. Flash freezing it and not whipping it at the same time totally ruins ice cream.
Haha probably, but it was the only thing I could think of that people would want to be cold faster. Maybe some other desserts, like lemon meringue or banana cream pies.
wouldn’t you just get a huge dipping dot?
Ah brick of frozen milk… large ice crystals to crunch on and a surface like concrete. My favorite kind of ice cream
Properly flash-frozen ice cream is actually very smooth since the ice crystals are very small. The water freezes before it has a chance to form large crystals.
Neat. I mean makes sense considering dip n dots
