In 2006, two scientists announced that they had cooked an egg by placing it in between two cell phones. It has been thrououghly disproven and analyzed since the surface of the claim, but it is still an excellent opportunity to use the Scientific Thinking Principles on!
#1: Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses
This principle isn't the most relevant because the experiment doesn't exactly prove any hypotheses. But it can still apply to the attempt to cook an egg between two cell phones because there could be other effects causing that outcome.
#2: Correlation vs. Causation
There are so many other reasons that the egg could've cooked! Maybe it was really hot out? Or the cell phone egg set up was within a microwave? Not the most probable of all possible causations, but it proves the point. There could be many other ways this egg could've cooked (or in actuality, the fact that it didn't cook at all) that we need to examine or at least acknowledge that they could be there.
#3: Falsifiability
This claim is very out there so it has a really good chance of being able to be falsified. As we will see in #4, after replicating the incident one can find almost instantly that it is in fact a hoax.
#4: Replicability
As many people did, reproducing the egg cooking experiement will prove that it is in fact a hoax. Every reproduction that was prodcued failed to yield the same results as the first, which made everything make sense when the site's webmaster that published the article stepped forward to say it was in fact completely fake.
#5: Extraordinary Claims
The claim that you can cook an egg with two cell phones is pretty extraordinary yet there is no extraordinary evidence to back it up! In fact, it is just too extraordinary to be real.
#6: Occam's Razor
In my mind, the simpliest explaination would be that it simply is not true. The end.
I'm not going to lie, if this claim was true I would be thrilled. In addition to being in awe of the power of technology, it would make cooking meals for myself in my dorm room a whole lot easier! Unfortunately though, this is a hoax. With the help of the Six Principles of Scientific Thinking, I will never fall for this or any other raw food cooking claim ever again!
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