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How Bad Can Wi-fi Be?
An anonymous reader writes "Sunday night in the UK, the BBC broadcast an alarmist Panorama news programme that suggested wireless networking might be damaging our health. Their evidence? Well, they admitted there wasn't any, but they made liberal use of the word 'radiation', along with scary graphics of pulsating wifi base stations. They rounded-up a handful of worried scientists, but ignored the majority of those who believe wifi is perfectly harmless. Some quotes from the BBC News website companion piece: 'The radiation Wi-Fi emits is similar to that from mobile phone masts ... children's skulls are thinner and still forming and tests have shown they absorb more radiation than adults'. What's the science here? Can skulls really 'absorb' EM radiation? The wifi signal is in the same part of the EM spectrum as cellphones but it's not 'similar' to mobile phone masts, is it? Isn't a phone mast several hundred/thousand times stronger? Wasn't safety considered when they drew up the 802.11 specs?"
FRAUD ALERT -- FRAUD ALERT -- FRAUD ALERT
Slashdot editors apparently don't read the comments on the stories they post. Also, Slashdot editors apparently didn't listen in Physics class. This is the fifth time in 3 years that they have fallen for the same fraud, if I count correctly. Some of my other comments:
Max Planck would be very sad about this.
Distinguish between real science and junk science.
Planck's constant is so small that interactions between electromagnetic waves and molecules cannot be chemically specific. The 2,000 MHz radiation from WiFi is felt as heat, a very, very small amount of heat, almost certainly not measurable.
Anyone may have theories. Someone could say, for example, that pigs have started flying and they have been eating the bees. (The bees are dying because of bad management; the organic beekeepers aren't having problems.) The only real science, however, is based on what is already known through experimentation. That requires an understanding of what is known.