Floating in the Electromagnetic Sea

ID: 050710.1051

While listening to my iPod on my Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones, someone walked by talking on a cell phone. BuzzZZZzzz. Their cell phone was interferring with my headphones. The electromagnet waves generated by their cell phone were interferring with the electromagnetic waves generated by my headphones. The buzzing I heard was that interference.

A couple days later I was again using the Bose headphones when I got a cell phone call. I lifted one side of the headphone, pressing my cell phone to that ear — why do just one thing when you can do two? — and again, I heard the interference on the other side, where the headphone was still covering my other ear. I tried moving the free side of the headphones about, but there was no influence on the other headphone. The electromagnetic waves from the cell phone radiated across my head — through my brain — from the ear next to the cell phone, to the opposite ear covered by the headphones.

A few days later, I was trying out my Polar S150 Heart Monitor. It works great. A transmitter strapped around my chest sends a wireless signal to a watch receiver that displays, in additional to time and date, my heart rate. I decided to leave it on while doing routine tasks. When I went to use my laptop, the watch showed my heart rate had fallen to zero! (Work can do that.) When I moved away from the laptop, my heart rate returned to normal. Clearly, the electromagnetic waves generated by my laptop were interferring with the wrieless signal from my chest transmitter.

The same thing happened when I went to use my car. As soon as I started the car, the watch receiver showed my heart rate as zero. The eletromagnetic waves generated by the battery and alternator under the hood of the car were intererring with the signal transmitted from my chest to the watch on my wrist.

I've noticed this before. Once I had a cheap AM radio I wanted to play while I was working. If it was near enough to my computer, it buzzed as the computer's electromagnetic radiation interferred with the radio waves being received by the radio. When I moved into an apartment with a clear view of radio/television transmitting towers across San Francisco Bay, I received perfect TV reception without attaching any antenna. In fact, the radio and TV radiation I was receiving through the large picture windows was so strong, it produced ghost images after I connected Cable TV to the television.

When I'm sitting in my car, listening to the radio, I think about how that's possible. It's not that a particular radio station is directing radio waves at my car, but that those radio waves are being generated as enormous spheres of radiation in all directions. I'm being bombarded by radio waves from every other radio station that's within range. I turn the tuner to select the one I want to listen to, letting all the others pass through the radio — and me — without noticing them.

It's the same thing when I receive a cell phone call. Some relay station is sending out spheres of radiation containing all the cell phone calls within range. My telephone selects only the one designated for it, letting all the others pass through it — and me.

I am sitting in front of my laptop. There is a printer to my right, and another laptop to my left. There are two external hard drives behind the laptop I'm working with. Beneath my desk is a desktop computer, a battery-backup power source, and another electrical extension with power surge protection on it. Above my head is the Cable modem attached to the AirPort Express wireless network plugged into the battery-backup power source. I'm using a Bluetooth wireless mouse. There's a light over my head.

I'm surprised I don't glow in the dark.

Tomorrow I'm going to have MRI (Magnetic Resonace Imaging) of my right elbow. In the last year I'm had a half dozen CAT (Computed Axial Tomography) Scans with Iodine injection, a Bone Scan, a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) Scan with positrons from the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a couple dozen X-rays, and a Nuclear Cardiac Study.

Sheesh! I'm glad I gave up smoking.

About a hundred years ago, Guglielmo Marconi pioneered wireless telegraphy. The telegraph had been in use for about seventy-five years before that. Before the telegraph and wireless, the only electromagnetic radiation people were likely to encounter was that from the Sun, "cosmic radiation" from outer space, and radiation left over from the "Big Bang" birth of the Universe itself. In the last twenty-five years we've increased by orders of magnitude the concentrations of radiation in this invisible sea in which we live. It's fun. It's useful. But as to what it's long-term effects will be on flesh and blood, no one really knows.

So far, so good.

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