Cooking food without heating it? It's possible...

If we are very hungry and have only a piece of raw meat at hand, but cannot find any heat source, what should we do? Eat the raw meat? There is another way, that is to cook the meat.

This may sound far-fetched, because I have never heard of anyone using hitting to turn a piece of raw meat into cooked meat, but this is a very interesting question, because theoretically, this seems to be possible, after all, kinetic energy can be converted into heat energy. Since it is theoretically possible, we can move on to the next question, which is how many times do we need to hit a piece of meat to cook it? At this point, we have to use the heat energy formula, that is, the added heat energy = the mass of the meat x the specific heat capacity x the temperature change. If you want to turn raw meat into cooked meat, it must be at least 80 degrees, so the temperature change here can be set to 80 degrees, but the specific heat capacity is a difficult data to obtain.

What is specific heat? Simply put, it is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 kg of a substance by 1 Kelvin, and its unit is joule per kilogram Celsius, or J/(kg·℃).

Different substances require different amounts of heat to raise their temperature, and the difference may be huge. For example, the specific heat capacity of water is 4200 J/(kg·℃), the specific heat capacity of air is 1030 J/(kg·℃), and the specific heat capacity of hydrogen is as high as 14000 J/(kg·℃). Different substances have different specific heat capacities, and the same substance has different specific heat capacities under different conditions. For example, the specific heat capacity of liquid water mentioned earlier is 4200 J/(kg·℃), but if it is placed in a pressure environment of 300x10∧5P, its specific heat capacity will drop below 4100 J/(kg·℃).

The specific heat capacity data of substances such as water and air are available, but the specific heat capacity data of meat cannot be obtained directly, and there are also large differences in the specific heat capacity of different meats. Therefore, if you want to obtain the specific heat capacity data of a piece of meat, you can only do it through experiments.

The specific heat capacity experiment of a substance is relatively simple. We only need to place a piece of meat in hot water of known temperature. Then the temperature of the water will drop and the temperature of the meat will rise. After that, we only need to measure the value of the increase in the temperature of the meat to calculate its specific heat capacity. With the specific heat capacity, we can bring it into the heat energy formula to find out how much heat energy is needed to turn a piece of raw meat into cooked meat. Finally, we can calculate the required kinetic energy, and then we will know how many times we need to beat the meat to cook it.

Such an interesting question has naturally been calculated by someone. According to data provided by a physics professor named Red Allen, if you use your hands to pat, it will take more than 490,000 slaps to heat a 2-kilogram raw chicken to 74 degrees Celsius.

However, this data is purely theoretical. In reality, if you really want to slap a chicken until it is cooked, you need to slap it much more than this number. Why? Because to cook a chicken, you need continuous heat, not just heating it to more than 70 degrees. So after slapping it 490,000 times, you have to continue slapping it to keep the chicken at a continuous high temperature. On the other hand, during the slapping process, the meat not only absorbs heat, but also loses heat. If the lost heat is taken into account, the number of slaps may increase to more than one million.

Although there is a theory, practice is the only criterion for testing truth. If most people have not seen a piece of meat being cooked with their own eyes, they will definitely think it is too incredible. So some people actually did such an experiment.

A foreign guy named Louis Weiss built a "meat beater" by himself and named it "Meat Beater 9000". This thing consists of a wooden arm and a motor system. The first experiment verified that beating can indeed heat up the chicken, but the temperature only increased by 16°C, so he built a more powerful meat beater again, but the experiment still failed because the chicken was beaten to pieces. This is another problem in reality. Although kinetic energy can be converted into heat energy, kinetic energy can also turn food into ashes.

For the last time, Louis Weiss placed the chicken in an ultra-thin container made of aerogel insulation material and started beating it again, eventually heating the chicken to 55°C. It took a total of 135,000 beatings to reach this temperature.

Although the meat was not cooked by beating in the end, it was enough to prove the correctness of the theory, because the temperature of the chicken did rise. If it continues, I believe the chicken will eventually be cooked. We now know that beating can indeed turn raw meat into cooked meat, but we must not try to cook a piece of meat by hand, because force is mutual and energy is conserved. Therefore, there are only two results in the end when using hands to conduct such an experiment. The first is that the experiment fails and the meat is not cooked. The other is that the experiment succeeds and the meat is cooked. At the same time, the hands are also cooked.

For more information, please follow the official account: sunmonarch