Saturday, October 31, 2020

Medicine, Cooking, and Magnetism


The view from the Costco parking lot the other day as I looked at the hospital across the street:


A picture of the bottom of our most oft-used pots in our kitchen:



If you had told me when I was a kid that there would be brand new technology to looking inside your body or that there would be a new way to cook food in my lifetime, I would have thought you were crazy.  

People have actually assumed that our pots are either new or we don't use them because they are so bright and shiny. Actually they have been in daily use since 2013 but they have only ever been used on our induction stove.

I believe that huge cylinder being placed into the hospital near my local Costco is an MRI machine. (now you know they don't assemble them on site, but ship them whole!)

Induction stoves work by flipping the natural magnetic moments in the metals of the pans themselves.  They stay nice and shiny because heat is not transferred into them, they generate the heat from within as those magnetic domains are flipped over and over by the coils in the stove.

MRI devices image the location of hydrogen atoms in your body by flipping the magnetic moment of the single protons in their nucleus using the coils in the machine. Your body is not exposed to any ionizing radiation or radioactive substances at all during the process.

Alls I'm saying is: Magnets are pretty cool.


"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

No comments:

Post a Comment