I read through this Shermer "Skeptic" article twice. This guy suffers from a severe lack of knowledge and imagination. The gist of the article is that the power of cell phone radiation is too low to break the electron bonds of the organic molecules of the head, so holding a cell phone at your head cannot cause damage. "The cell phone generated radiation of less tahn 0.001 kJ/mole . . . 240,000 weaker than green light!" And he says even if you increase the signal strength the photons cannot break bonds.
Yeah, okay. First of all, that radiation is penetrating. If it were not, the cell phone signal would not reach the cell tower. Some of those photons are heating the skin and brain tissue. For that matter, the cell phone produces 1 or 2 watts of waste heat, and that alone might be a problem. When you hold a cell phone next to your skin for hours a day, as some people do, you are heating and irradiating a small area. I do not know if this causes damage, but if it does, I doubt that would surprise any biologist. I have seen anecdotal reports of people in construction and other field operations who pressed cell phones to their heads for several hours a day, over several years, and developed cancer right where the cell phone was placed. This kind of anecdotal evidence does not prove a connection in epidemiology, but it is suggestive, and you would be a fool to ignore it. Suppose I proposed taping a 2-watt joule heater to Mr. Shermer's head, for several hours a day over several years. Would he be sanguine about the effects of heating the tissue for such a long periods? How could he know that will not cause damage? No one has done that kind of test, so no one can say what effect it might have. No one has done that test because portable 2-watt heaters that you hold next to your skin and brain for several months a year did not exist until recently, and because that is damn foolish thing to do. Millions of people hold cell phones near their heads, and most suffer no damage, so obviously if there is an effect is it small. Perhaps it only triggers problems in people with a genetic disposition to cancer in the first place. Many carcinogens are like that. Anyway, it is foolish to perform uncontrolled tests of this nature. There are simple ways to avoid holding the cell phone near your head for hours at a time, and anyone who needs to talk that much should use them. Shermer has been a frequent critic of cold fusion. He has never offered any technical reasons to doubt the results, and I doubt that he knows anything about the experiments. I expect that if he were to come up with reasons they would be as shallow and misinformed as these comments about cell phones. - Jed
