A friend e-mailed a YouTube video to me today, showing a group of folks popping kernels of corn with their cell phones. There are actually several of them spiking everybody's interest, and here's a typical one:
Here at the office, we were intrigued and a little freaked out. If a few cell phones could pop corn in seconds, just imagine what cell phones are doing to our brains (and that would actually explain a lot).
We had to try it, but after an exclusive Creative Loafing investigation, as well as consulting other investigations, it has been confirmed this is indeed a hoax. You may proceed trying it at home.
In the interests of good (pseudo) science (performed by non-scientists), we recorded the entire experiment from the beginning:
As you can see, it didn't work. It is possible we did something wrong, but that is unlikely. We may be journalists, but we know how to put cell phones in a circle, drop corn kernels in the middle and coordinate four people to call those cell phones simultaneously.
So for help, I called a physicist.
"I have no idea what the energy density of a cell phone is … (but) the energy probably isn't high enough to pop a kernel," said Matthias Batzill, a professor of physics at the University of South Florida.
A certain amount of heat is required to pop corn and the minimal amount created by a cell phone would quickly dissipate, Batzill said. It wouldn't get hot enough to pop the kernel.
The YouTube videos look pretty convincing, but so does David Copperfield's magic and I know that the Statue of Liberty is still in New York. A part of demystifying the hoax is figuring out how it was done.
"I have no idea" how they are doing it, said James Randi, of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a group that investigates pseudoscientific claims.
He suggests some type of heat source was placed under the table that pops the corn. That seems like the most obvious explanation; however, the cell phones would likely melt or the table cloth would get too hot.
Batzill said it may be possible someone could take a microwave apart and use the parts to heat the corn, although he said he doesn't believe anyone could actually do it. In addition, he knows of no types of waves or heat sources that could pop the corn but not damage human flesh in the process.
Randi said he thinks people produce these types of videos to get media attention and then they go away after the media gets bored with them. He said he has been getting calls all day about the popcorn videos but he hasn't seen them yet and doesn't know how they are made. He is sure the producers have used some kind of sleight-of-hand and this is another scam.
"Videos like this aren't hard to make," said Randi. "You can produce a videotape to prove anything you want."
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2008.