#chemical physics
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Why a microwave oven is not tuned to water
A microwave oven heats liquid water through dielectric relaxation, not a narrow resonance. A traceable single-Debye calculation separates the dielectric-loss-factor peak from attenuation, quantifies a pure-water baseline, and shows why the same idealized channel is weak in ice.
Refraction is absorption you can't see
A material that absorbed no light at any frequency would have a refractive index of exactly 1 — no lenses, no prisms, no rainbows. Refraction is not the opposite of absorption; it is a causal side effect of it, and the Kramers–Kronig relations say exactly how much.