...Do you honestly think that a common or garden kitchen appliance that is present in millions of homes would be allowed on the market if the user got a blast of microwaves every time they opened the door during cooking? Really?
No. Do you honestly think that I do?
I last used a microwave oven about 1986 or 1987, and because I knew then not to open the door when the magnetron was operating, I most likely learned it from strong warnings in an instruction book of earlier years. Which might indicate that it was easily done back then. Besides, they have no doubt evolved considerably since then.
Look up "interlocks"...
Please tell me why I should do that. I was probably quite familiar with interlocks by 1962, by doing the sort of things that rural Kiwi teenagers did back then -- milking cows, operating high-speed cream separators and other machinery, ploughing paddocks, bringing in the hay, fiddling with engines, firearms and shanghais, sawing wood, travelling to sea in fishing boats, riding horses, building models, and dismantling and reassembling Bren Guns -- although I don't recall whether they actually had interlocks.
What I do recall is that two or three of the smartest cows in a herd of 40 figured out how to operate some of the simple mechanical interlocks that were used to inhibit their movements. So they also knew about them in the early 1960s.
Do you honestly think it would have been impossible to open the door of the microwave oven at Parkes while it was operating? If so, perhaps you should take it up with Emily Petroff, the PhD student at Parkes, or Dr Simon Johnston, head of astrophysics at the Australian CSIRO, the national science agency, because he apparently told the
Guardian, "If you set it to heat and pull it open to have a look, it generates interference."
See this
Guardian article dated 5 May 2015 for more information:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-oven-caused-mystery-signal-plaguing-radio-telescope-for-17-yearsBesides talking about modern interference from mobile phones, WiFi etc., that article says the microwave oven signals were most likely produced by maintenance staff, not astronomers, so I do apologise to the technical people for question 2 in post 4. I was misled by the
Morning Mail article which says scientists were responsible.
I also get the impression from the
Guardian that the articles linked in post 1 might be about two different subjects and that the
Morning Mail writer might have confused the them, as often happens with technical matters.
1. The
Guardian says the signals produced by the microwave oven were first detected in 1998, and known to be local, within 5km of the telescope.
2. It also says "Then on 1 January this year they installed a new receiver which monitored interference, and detected strong signals at 2.4 GHz, the signature of a microwave oven."
3. The
Morning Mail mentions "11 bursts detected since 2007", and says they came from outer space, another galaxy, the cosmos, and possibly a new pulsar.
4. It also says
“Tests revealed that a [signal] can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle,” Ms Petroff says in her paper.
So we have 2.4 and 1.4 GHz signals, and signals from outer space and signals that are known to be local.
The abstract in this paper:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.02165v1.pdf(which is mostly over my head) mentions both frequencies, the microwave oven, fast radio bursts (FRBs), and finishes with "...we furthermore demonstrate that the microwaves on site
could not have caused FRB 010724. This and other distinct observational differences show that FRBs are excellent candidates for
genuine extragalactic transients." (My emphasis.)
Others here might understand the paper better than I, and it would be interesting to find if we do indeed have two different subjects here.
