Phones Emitting the Most Radiation

Please read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation#Health_...

If you've ever taken antibiotics, I think I have bad news for you...

A phone and a microwave aren't comparable. A microwave contains an extremely focused emitter.

It's the difference between staring at an LED light and a Class 3B or Class 4 laser.

That laser will burn right through your cornea but you could affix the LED directly to the surface of your eye without any measurable ill effect.

I am not a physicist, so I'm probably at least subtly wrong, but...

The photon has the same energy regardless of where it is measured, but the total intensity of the radiation (of all the photons reaching a unit of area normal to the source) decreases with the inverse square of the distance because the photons move generally (except insofar as they are acted upon by forces like the gravitational and electromagnetic) in straight lines at diverging angles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

That's the energy carried by each individual photon. In terms of the number of photons, a typical lightbulb emits one two to orders of magnitude more; the number of photons illuminating a surface will reduce with the square of distance (assuming an isotropic radiator).

The illuminance in direct sunlight is two or three orders of magnitude greater than in an artificially lit room; sunlight also contains photons at UV wavelengths, which can carry up to two orders of magnitude more energy than visible photons.

Sunscreen is opaque at UV wavelengths but effectively transparent at visible wavelengths, partly for aesthetic reasons but mainly because the lower-energy visible photons cause negligible damage to skin. UV photons are sufficiently energetic to break apart bonds in DNA, but visible photons only carry enough energy to heat the skin.

Mobile phones are utterly feeble radiators, both in terms of photon energy and the quantity of photons. In terms of your exposure to electromagnetic radiation, they're a rounding error.

Can you cite some specific concern here about the 3G-4G range?

On a personal level are you actually staying away from mobile phones given the risk that some commentators seem to imply?

Arc lamp / microwave tower is still heat damage, not ionization damage.

The problem is that the distinction you're trying to make doesn't practically matter. As best we know now, the non-ionising radiation emitted by approved mobile phone transmitters is so minimally harmful that it is considered harmless. So it might denature a protein here and there, "cooking" an infinitesimally small amount of tissue, but any measurement of this damage, so far, completely lost in the noise. It is, for all practical purposes, as far as we best know now, harmless.

> 1 watt at close range at 2.4ghz is lethal given enough time.

Well, I'm curious as to how you determined this. It's plausible, so long as the target absorbs everything, radiates nothing, and is incapable of healing. Source?

That’s just not how it works at all though. It’s not causing any damage, it’s heating your tissue such a small amount that it doesn’t get anywhere near hot enough to ‘cook’ any of it.

You would need a lot more power, or an antenna pattern much more focused, and for it to be continuously emitting for a long time while very close to your skin to actually get hot enough to cause burns or denature proteins (which is about the only thing non-ionising radiation can do).

But phones don’t transmit all the time, but in bursts, and the antenna pattern spreads the radiation out.

Our company builds satellite antennas that focus 25-100W of RF power (in various bands from L band at 1-2GHz up to Ka at 29-31GHz) into about a 1 degree or so beam (big parabolic dish reflector), and at that point you need to take some precautions. I don’t have a single worry about phones.