I’m hoping to get some informed opinons on the topic of the ‘dangers of cellphone radiation’. I’d had my cursory glances through various headlines over the years and had come down on the side of ‘don’t worry about it’. A dinner conversation with a USC research scientist seemed to off the rails, where she ‘respectfully disagreed’ with my overall dismissive of her statement “the Jury is still out, but it’s best to limit exposure”.
She said in her conversations with John Samet she has significant concerns about the impact.
Anyone have more info or suggested readings on this?
While it’s a good idea to be safe with an uncertain risk, you have to be reasonable about it. There’s no plausible mechanism for cell phone radiation to cause cancer. The radiation is non-ionizing, meaning it doesn’t have enough energy to break chemical bonds, and you don’t get enough energy in heat to worry about.
Whatever risk there is from cell phones, the risk from hair dryers would be about a thousand times higher. After we ban hair dryers, we can then talk about limiting cell phone use.
Not hair dryers. Light bulbs, of any kind - visible light is just electromagnetic radiation after all, the same as microwaves but higher in energy. And you can even cook with it.
In any event, it is only once you get to ultraviolet that the energy gets high enough to break chemical bonds and cause direct radiation damage, as opposed to indirect damage from heating, which just depends on the overall power level (this better be right or I am in trouble, given how much high powered electric fields I expose myself to on a daily basis, due to my hobby in electronics; this is mostly lower frequency but some claim that even 60 Hz power lines cause cancer…).
