Subject: (Tegenfeldt) Power, SAR, other measures (fwd)
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1998 093437 -0600 (CST)
From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org>
To: emfguru <rbeavers@llion.org>
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.......More comment on the measurements aspect.....guru......
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1998 13:38:36 +0100
From: Clas Tegenfeldt
To: "Roy L. Beavers"
Subject: Power, SAR, other measures
Hi all!
I would like to share some thoughts about the different possible
measures one can use to describe something.
There has been a discussion going on about SAR, is it good or bad?
Both! Is power a relevant measure? Yes and no! OK?
Take any amount of energy and ask yourself is this harmful?
Let us say it is 100 Wh, is is a health hazard or not?
If we put those 100 Wh into an incandescent light bulb we
would probably say it is harmless and indeed benificient.
If we put those 100 Wh into moving a car it would not be that
harmful to smash that car into a wall or something since the
impact wouldn´t be that hard would it? But put those 100 Wh
into moving a bullet, would that be dangerous to your health?
No if you point the gun towards someone else, yes if you recieve
that bullet and absorb the energy in a tiny fraction of a second
on impact. The same energy absorbed over a longer time will not
even be noticed.
About the "impossibility" to get any biological effect from a
low "nonthermal" quantity of energy, think about this scenario:
You have 40 metric tons moving at a speed of 100 km/h, any
engineer or researcher could tell you that it is utterly impossible
that you could stop that moving mass with just a few (I mean just
a few) photons constituting such a tiny energy that most just
discard it as zero. But IF those photons were hitting the human
eye of the truck driver and (s)he perceived those photons as a
red light? Then a cascade effect would take place that transformed
those few photons into a nerve signal into a muscle movement into
a hydraulic/pneumatic amplified braking of the vehicle! Thus
it always depend on the context if any quantuum, however small,
of energy can have an effect on a system or not!
To take a somewhat more "thermal" ;-) example, a small surface
charge made by triboelectric mechanisms can give a
discharge that may ignite oil vapour and blow the whole
oil refinery up into the upper atmosphere. A small surface
charge is not thermal even though the explosion is.
Talk about amplification!
It is in fact /possible/, until shown wrong, that the biological
systems /may/ have such cascade effects from certain EMFs.
It is probably wrong to assume that any field, of any kind, any
frequency, any strength, any direction, any polarisation, any
modulation, any combination of these, would have exactly the
same impact, wouldn´t it? So, there are some parameter dependency
for the sensing of the field(s). What are those parameters?
Who can say with confidence that he knows?
Then how come some people go on stubbornly to advocate that
ONLY power or absorbed power is the ONLY parameter sensible
to measure or discuss? There are a vast multidimensional
parameter space to investigate, if one focuses on only one
there is a high probability that one fail to understand
the phenomenon.
The only real question of fundamental importance is this:
Can an electromagnetic in any way at all influence a biological
system?
* Yes! By heating tissue.
* Yes! By photons in the eye.
* Yes! By mechanical movement by magnetite.
* Yes! By mechanical movement of small hairs in a strong electric field.
* Yes! By DC magnetic fields in navigation/orientation of birds, etc.
* Yes! By sensing of electric fields in nanovolts/m by sharks.
So, we KNOW there are effects, and we should already know those are
NOT thermal in nature. We do not understand the mechanisms at work.
SAR as well as power density are good measures of the technical side,
but for the biological side we desperately need to use ALL possible
ways to characterise fields! ALL! Then we may stumble across the right
one, sooner or later.
Think again of those lonely photons hitting the truck drivers
eye, that is an example of an electromagnetic wave giving
a far reaching biological and technical effect that is
completely and utterly "athermal" in nature... :-)
Clas Tegenfeldt ,,,
(o o)
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Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html