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Scott Hurst, on the WHO report that classed cell phone use as a 'possible carcinogen' (same category as coffee) based on insufficient evidence to label it either safe or clearly dangerous, 2011-06-01:
The problem is that we do have relevant data for a much greater than a couple decade span.
We've been exposing people (like me) who work in communications and RADAR fields with exactly the same frequencies but at enormously higher power for the better part of a century. If there was really something to worry about here, we'd long ago had stories like Marie Curie's and the "Radium Girls".
Nothing like hanging out in a room with fluorescentcent lights shining and all the switches turned off, you know you're getting some serious RF exposure then.
Radiation in the 1-10 Ghz range hold few surprises any more. Not only does our theoretically understanding of light offer no possible way for such puny photons to cause cancer, we have spectacular evidence of no harm after 'high dose' exposure to the same from at least the 1940s.
(no subject)
i don't know anyone who holds a light bulb to their head.
which is to also to say that the strength of the electromagnetic field increases exponentially as you get closer to the sources.
i don't know anyone who holds a light bulb to their head. if that were the case, the above argument might make sense.
Re: i don't know anyone who holds a light bulb to their head.
[*] In a really poor-reception area, so the phone turns up its power as much as possible to compensate.
Re: i don't know anyone who holds a light bulb to their head.
measuring em field strength by comparing it to ability to light a fluorescent bulb is like trying to determine if ultrasound matches the resonant frequency of a wine glass by seeing if the wine glass breaks. ultrasound still has an effect, but it's not being measured usefully.
Re: i don't know anyone who holds a light bulb to their head.
I was envisioning a faint, pencil-eraser-sized fuzzy glowing spot where the cell phone touched the light bulb, when I wondered whether a cell phone could make one glow.
"like trying to determine if ultrasound matches the resonant frequency of a wine glass by seeing if the wine glass breaks"
Yeah, but if you know the frequency is close enough, and one source is loud enough to shatter the wine glass but another source just makes it vibrate a little, you have a comparison of intensity. Not a very (er, at all) precise comparison, but you can say one is stronger than the other as measured at the location of the wine glass.
In any case, you're still not going to get more than 300 mW of exposure out of a 300 mW emitter, or more than 3 W exposure from a 3 W emitter. (Antennas are physical objects, not dimensionless geometric point sources, so you cannot get paradoxically close and convince the universe to divide by zero for you ... OTOH, the antenna is probably large enough that moving from 1 mm to 2 mm doesn't reduce your exposure by 75%.) Assuming that the antenna is omnidirectional or nearly so (if I were designing a phone, I wouldn't want it to work worse when the user turns around), even with the antenna lying right against a flat patch of skin, half the power would be radiated in the other direction.
Unfortunately, I don't know how powerful the emitters Mr. Hurst worked around were, nor range of distances from them in his lab/office/workplace, or we could just calculate the intensity he and his coworkers were exposed to and compare it to the total emissions from a phone. I'm guessing Mr. Hurst has done the arithmetic.