This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
I'm removing to signfeld example, as it doesn't actully match the Trope, Kramer didn't change the tempurature or the cooking time
Working Title: Bad Oven Math: From YKTTW
Earnest: I can see where I went wrong with the conversions, since the ratio there isn't one to one (oh, the irony!), and how converting metric to imperial is a nightmare that has already cost the life of one innocent space probe, but for the life of me I don't know how to clean up the middle paragraph without losing that. We could put the right Fahrenheit temperature for 380 celsius (716F) but then the next line becomes confusing. Gah, I'm having bad physics flashbacks!
Can I point something out here? The reason Oven Logic is invalid has to do with thermodynamics and the way cooking in ovens work (i.e., an oven is not a microwave). The specific heat of air is lower than that of whatever it is your cooking, so energy gets replenished in the air inside the oven faster than it disperses into the interior of the product to be cooked. This means that at higher temperatures, all that happens is the outside burns quicker; the interior of the food-product-system won't take much longer to cook.
Great Limmick: Which is why foods can be boiled or fried much faster than they can be baked: Oil and water both have a higher specific heat than air. On a side note, is anyone aware of an example where someone used a pottery kiln, incinerator, or similar device specifically because a conventional oven wasn't hot enough to apply Oven Logic?
32_Footsteps: Not off the top of my head, but Fridge Logic dictates that for some of the extreme temperatures out there, they'd have to (my own oven only goes up to around 550 F - and the only recipes I know that even go above 400 F are baked frites). I imagine this is for two reasons - one, to keep too many people from trying extreme cases of this trope and setting fire to many more kitchens, and two, because even if you were keeping track of things, convection from heat escaping the oven would quickly make the area around the stove unbearable.
