View From the Bushes

Last Wednesday, my mother threw a Halloween party for all her grandkids. Generally speaking, you can make an event fun for children or fun for adults, but it's very difficult to make it fun for both. This particular party was squarely geared towards being fun for children, with the adults hanging around as chaperones and so my expectations were pretty low. But then my dad, who recently retired from life as a sleep and shiftwork consultant to become a science and math teacher, decided to show us an experiment he's been trying to perfect involving a lightbulb and a microwave, and that's when things became fun for children and adults.

The experiment was fairly simple: put a lightbulb in a microwave oven. The complicated part was trying to get it to explode reliably. My dad claimed that the first light bulb he had tried had exploded right off the bat, but after heating and sometimes melting several bulbs we were unable to get any of them to explode. At that point we started to look more closely at his first attempt, and discovered that while we were using a large plate he had used a smaller plate. We tried the smaller plate and sure enough the bulb exploded, but even with the smaller plate subsequent attempts were not universally successful (though one was so spectacular that my mother is going to be picking tiny pieces of glass out of her Lean Cuisines for a month). So we're still working on getting our success rate up.

I hadn't been thinking much about the problem when I just happened to stumble across a page entirely devoted to Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments. Though I'm somewhat disappointed to find that this road has been travelled before, it's nice to be able to find some previous documentation to help guide future research. And you can bet that there will be future research -- the possibility for destructive mayhem is just too enticing.

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Ross