Subject: (Fist) (French) Re Bond breaking (fwd)
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 051658 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org>
To: emfguru@hotmail.com
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 17:09:14 +1000
From: Stewart Fist
To: "Roy L. Beavers"
Subject: Re: (French) Re: Bond breaking (fwd)
I'm not so sure that Peter French is right to define 'non-ionising' radiation
in quite this way -- because in the terms of physicists, it just means EMF
frequencies above a certain wavelength, with a certain level of energy.
Accepting his other points and obviously the transduction stuff is vitally
important, I still suggest that there's an unresolved question is whether EMF
at levels below UV can break chemical bonds - and I would suggest that
stochastic resonance provides such a mechanism.
The point is that radio and light waves may not have the energy on their own
to break bonds, but in the presence of noise in the systems (and most
perceptual mechanisms seem to have electrical noise) it may be that the
summation of energies on occasions (assuming the noise is random in summation
and subtraction) will occasionally take the bond over the threshold.
If such is the case, then I wouldn't expect to find noise in in vitro
research, but I would in the vivo stuff.
I accept everything else Peter says, but I wouldn't be quite as ready to throw
away the 'not up to bond-breaking threshold' argument.
With a dark-adapted eye on a moonless night it is possible to see stars which
astronomical measurements tell us, must be triggered by the eye receiving only
one photon. I don't see how one photon has enough energy to create a nerve
impulse in the retina (and the consequent cascade of amplification effects we
call vision), unless it breaks some sort of chemical bond.
--
Stewart Fist - writer and columnist
See http://www.theaustralian.com.au/techno/columns/fist.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/http/sfist/ (some archives)
http://www.electric-words.com (main archives)
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Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html