Author: James Gorman / Source: New York Times
If you haven’t seen what happens to grapes in a microwave oven, you haven’t spent enough time in the richly nerdy corner of the internet that specializes in strange, everyday phenomena with fascinating, plausible scientific explanations.
To quote a physicist, Aaron D.
Slepkov, from his recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a pair of grape hemispheres exposed to intense microwave radiation will spark, igniting a plasma.”Pretty nerdy? Right.
What it means is that if you cut a grape in two, but leave the two halves connected by a skin bridge, the grape in the microwave will spark and produce a plasma that can sometimes be seen as a glowing cloud, floating up above the grape halves.
And this process is universally known among people who watch certain videos online — some of whom happen to be scientists seeking to understand unexpected chemical and physical behaviors in everyday materials.
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Plasmas sound like they only occur in the heart of the sun or in a fusion reactor, or in other rare circumstances. But what you see in a lightning bolt is a plasma. A flame may be a plasma or include one. And, obviously, a grape cut just so can make a plasma.
The explanations that circulated about this outburst had to do with something happening on the surface of the grape halves, which were presumed to be conducting electricity.
But oddly enough, no scientific laboratory had undertaken a study of…
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