Re: cellular phones

[John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 09:58 AM 5/28/00 -0700, Bernard G. Cleyet & Nancy Ann Seese wrote:

> However, I like someone's suggestion that the effect is molecular
> reaction disruption, not simple heating.

Can anybody suggest a _reason_ for liking that suggestion?

Is there any reason to think the suggestion is physically plausible?

In particular, would anyone care to comment on the following implausibility
argument?

1) Consider a reaction that takes the system from state "A" to state "B".

2) We know that the energies involved in the A/B transition must be large
compared to 25 milli-eV;  otherwise the transition would be completely
washed out by thermal noise.

3) At cell-phone frequencies, each quantum carries about 4
micro-eV.  Therefore to get a non-thermal effect, the reactants would need
to absorb about 6000 photons within some sort of coherence time.  One way
that could happen would be if (big if) there was a high-Q resonance.  It
would need to be quite a narrow resonance (Q=6000 or so).  And it would
need to be tuned right at the cell-phone Tx frequency.  You would need a
degree of freedom that is well coupled to the EM field, not well coupled to
the solvent (lest the solvent provide high damping) and crucially part of
the reaction pathway.

It is almost plausible to consider such a thing happening by means of ESR
(electron spin resonance) if you stick your head into a carefully tuned
magnetic field (about 300 gauss) while using a cell phone.

But suppose you wanted to engineer a system where the yield of a reaction
was significantly influenced by ESR (600 mW at 840MHz).  I don't think you
could engineer such a thing if you tried.  The chance of it happening by
accident seems quite remote.

So, we know about
 -- the obvious process involving the gross conductivity of water, and
 -- spin resonance (in abnormal applied fields)
... but other than that, does anybody have any experimental evidence for a
mechanism for RF absorption in ordinary biological tissue under normal
conditions?  If so, I'd love to see the evidence.

See also next msg.