"you don't need the energy to light an entire fluorescent light bulb to cause a local problem from a cellphone"
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.
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.