By: Blake Laing, Ph.D.
Professor, School of Engineering and Physics
Southern Adventist University
Collegedale, TN
Editor’s note: This article is a fact-checking response to a piece published in Issue 11, titled “The unseen harmful consequences of sleeping next to your phone every night” from Blake Laing, Ph.D., professor in the School of Engineering and Physics.
The microwave spectrum of radiation is definitely non-ionizing radiation. Photon energies range from about 0.000001 eV to 0.0001 eV, which means that an atom would have to absorb at least 10,000 microwave photons instantly to be ionized (the absorption of even three or more photons at a time is extremely unlikely).
Microwave radiation has the same effect on molecules as any other kind of heating: rotational motion is excited. It’s a non-starter to worry about ionization due to microwave radiation. Wireless phone signals (such as 5G), Wi-Fi signals and microwave radiation all use the microwave spectrum.
Microwave radiation is not ionizing, but the second question is still relevant: “What is the intensity?”
If our bodies absorb too much energy, we can get overheated, whether it comes from radio waves, microwaves, visible light, ultraviolet rays or X-rays. An extreme example of this is the Active Denial System “heat ray,” which directs 100 kW of power toward a combatant, raising the temperature of the skin. (For reference, a kitchen oven has a power of about 3 kW.)
The danger from this device lies in the amount of power it delivers, not the fact that it happens to use microwaves to deliver it. (It can cause something like sunburn to the skin with prolonged exposure.) We don’t have to lie awake wondering whether our bodies are absorbing too much radiation from a roommate’s microwave oven, cell phone or Wi-Fi router: if too much non-ionizing radiation is absorbed, we will feel it!
The bottom line is that we should be mindful of separating ourselves from our phones, but not because of hypothetical radiation risks, and we should limit our exposure to ultraviolet radiation because of tangible ionizing radiation risks. We can do both without fear.
