Friday, May 20, 2011
Or could it be that I'm getting slower in my declining years? Next week
there won't even be a late WN. I will be delivering an invited paper in
Stockholm.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, MD, the Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN, uses a wired
earpiece to avoid radiating his brain with microwaves. I don't even use a
cell phone, so am I safer than Sanjay Gupta? No not unless Sanjay keeps
his cell phone in his pants pocket when he uses the earpiece. Our gonads
dangle in that silly scrotum to keep them slightly below body temperature,
but they do seem dangerously exposed. Microwaves from the cell phone might
raise their temperature a bit. The most that could happen would be an
infinitesimal decrease in the fertility rate. At least that's in the right
direction. Sanjay Gupta is a good writer, and he's probably a good
doctor. I listen to him whenever I can. My mother would have said, "He's
a REAL doctor," as opposed to the PhD scientist kind. Trust me Mom, an
M.D. is not a scientist.
Here's the conversation I have several times a day with total strangers:
Caller: do you use a wired earphone? BP: No. Caller: would it be too much
trouble? BP: No. Caller: Wouldnt 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.
|
