The Last Word (We Should be So Lucky) on Mobile Phone Radiation. (May 24, 2011)

Bob Park in his latest What's New blog once more tries to get acknowledgement that Professor Einstein got it right in 1905.

Here's the conversation I have several times a day with total strangers: Caller: do you use a wired earphone? Bob Park: No. Caller: would it be too much trouble? BP: No. Caller: Wouldn’t you be safer? BP: No. Caller: How do you know? BP: Quantum physics; all cancers are caused by mutant strands of DNA. Electromagnetic radiation can't create mutant strands of DNA unless the frequency is at or higher than the blue limit of the visible spectrum – the near-ultraviolet. The frequency of cell phone radiation is about 1 million times too low. Caller: Wow! When did this news break? BP: Albert Einstein let it out in 1905*. Robert Millikan, considered to be the world's top physics experimentalist, spent a decade constructing an experiment to test it. It confirmed Einstein's theory perfectly. Caller: I'm shocked! Are you sure this is right?

BP: Virtually the entire modern world rests on it. Caller: Why am I just hearing about this? BP: Because Sanjay didn't tell you. We all depend on the news media to keep us informed, and the news media all over the world let us down on this one. And we scientists should have been screaming louder.

_____________________________________________

*The Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921 was awarded to Albert Einstein "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".