(Note: all views expressed are SOLELY those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Mobileshop.com)
The world is full of urban myths around mobile phones. I even did this blog post about it, trying to debunk some of them. There’s one urban myth, however, that seems to keep cropping up again and again and again. It also happens to be the one that gets on my wick more than any other: the oft-debunked idea that you can cook an egg using mobile phones.
Well, it’s popped up yet again, this time courtesy of The Statesman. Allegedly, scientists in India have managed to cook an egg using 4 mobile phones, a process that took around 80 minutes.
Cue me rolling my eyes, and my left eye starting to twitch…
According to the researchers, the radiation from mobile phones comes in two flavours: thermal effect and non-thermal effect. All fine and dandy except that, well, non-thermal effects of microwave energy haven’t even been proved to exist, yet, and if they do, they are theorised to cause reactions inside solids that turn stuff into plasma. Like, the same stuff the sun is made of.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen anyone’s head glow then explode from using a Nokia N96. And anyway, the human body’s mostly water, and non-thermal effects in liquids are almost definitely non-existent.
So, we’re back to that old favourite, thermal effects, with microwaves from mobile phones boiling your brains, which is where the egg story comes in, and where I lose all semblance of professionalism and get really narked off, because, bear in mind, the idea of mobile phones being able to cook eggs has been debunked over and over. It was even on Brainiac, where they couldn’t even get the egg to warm, when they used a HUNDRED mobile phones.
So, a hundred mobile phones couldn’t cook one, but four could?
Something doesn’t quite add up here…
Need I remind the researchers involved the countless number of people who’ve tried to replicate the “egg-cooking mobile phones” trick, all without success? Need I remind them that the only thing that’s claimed to have successfully cooked an egg using mobile phones is Russian tabloid Pravda, which is best described as the Sunday Sport but with added lunacy?
Pointless scaremongering like this really gets under my skin. I’m all for testing mobile phones, and proving them safe, just so the doomsayers will pack it in. But dubiously repeating previous claims of cooking an egg using mobile phones? That’s not science, that’s scaremongering of the highest order. To be a truly definitive test, the results need to be repeatable, and not one other person in the entire world has conclusively, in a rigorously documented way, cooked an egg with a phone.
The only way a Nokia N96, for example, will cause an egg to be cooked is you watch a cookery program on BBC iPlayer (where people are doing eggy recipes) via the phone, get a recipe, then go and cook an egg.
So, if you want to get recipes for egg-based dishes on your mobile phone, grab yourself the Nokia N96, with BBC iPlayer, today!